AI Replaced Me? I am 3D Artist transcript

If you are pro 3d artist, do not watch this video. Seriously, because it's insane how far AI advanced and we're gonna create AAA game asset only using AI tools. Watch until the end and I guarantee you'll be amazed. Guys, Steph again and we're gonna cook something today. Game asset that looks like a cinematic one using AI tools. As usual, we're gonna start with a concept and this time it will be a realistic sci-fi character, a warrior, a samurai.

I need a sword, a big one and finally I decided to go with this one. Cool, clean, huge sword like in Devil May Cry. I need it for some cool animation that we're gonna create from mocap also using AI. Stay with me, you're gonna see it soon. I always create references using Nanobanana and ChatGPT and there is ChatGPT 1.5 image right now. That's more than enough to do anything but if you're struggling with reference images, let me know in the comments and I'm gonna record video explaining how my workflow looks like.

The second step, let's extract some parts from our reference. Same as before, we're gonna use Nanobanana and it's super simple. Just drop an image with your full character and say something like extract head alone on simple solid background. Most likely, you will get it like in one run. So here you see, boom, done. This way, I created few parts which is handle, a blade, I created gloves alone. Fingers are very tricky for AI.

I also created legs, top, suit together to test it out. I also created armor plates alone and of course, head. And now, let's do AI magic. Let's move to 3D model creation. For this one, we're gonna use Waiwa 3D which is recently updated to version 2 and it's simply amazing which offers us up to 8K texture which is insane. And that's obviously the best choice right now for creating assets like this. The process looks very simple.

Just attach an image of a part, then you choose the quality of generation. I'm gonna go with Ultima Prime because I want to squeeze maximum details from it. The poly count is optional toy. If the asset is big with a lot of details, you can go up to 1 million and that's a good high poly base. Or if that's a small asset, you can definitely leave it as 300K or less. I really appreciate the flexibility here. And next step which is absolutely mind-blowing is the texturing.

So for this one, we're gonna option like fast 4K, real 4K, Ultima 8K, but we're gonna use it wise for big asset with big square and where we need all the details. We're gonna use 8K for some assets, smaller one, 4K is actually already enough. But I also want to make attention on the options that they have such as inside out texturing which might do very good job where another AI will not do. When there is some foldings on stuff, you can use this feature to improve the result.

I personally like texture adherence and unlit texture option. Unlit texture removes the environment lighting from texture and don't bake it which is amazing in some cases. There is no such control over texturing anywhere else. And you can also drop your own 3D model and texture it with YWATT 3D which is amazing. Now let's review the result and it's just amazing. Look how cool it is. It also create the materials and even like 4K, the result is stunning.

Of course for handle, I use just 4K because that's enough for a small object that will be in hand. Can we see the legs? Amazing job. Like look, I really really like how it carefully it follows all the details. Glows also really really good job. When it's zoomed like this, it will be all five fingers absolutely accurately. And this is an amazing job. Look how good the material look like. We also have blade looks just amazing.

And here is the hand. It also look just amazing. There are some small things to tweak like this eyes because this is a hidden area. But I'm gonna show you like how we tweak it with AI in no time. And you can test Vivo right now by link in the description and use my promo code to get juicy discount. All right, all assets created. Let's download them and assemble our character. That's super simple. Just press the download button here and you get the GLB asset.

For this one, we're gonna use Blender. This is a free tool and it's really good to assemble things to combine parts to keep things in one place. You don't need to be a pro in Blender. We're gonna just drop assets here and position it with simple controls. And if you are just a beginner, I have a free YouTube course just for you to get a knowledge with simple things in Blender and get your 3D assets on the next level.

Okay, so we're gonna drag and drop the asset in the scene. We're gonna position it a little bit. You can use controls on the left side or you can use some buttons. You can see what I'm pressing here. We're gonna need two main thing to each asset decimated to reduce amount of polygons. For this one, we're gonna use a decimate modificator in Blender. So here you basically tell it how to collapse the amount of polygons and we're gonna use value like 0 .05.

Press enter. You're gonna need to wait a bit because it is high poly asset. It might take a little bit to actually process it. All right, so you can see the optimized asset looks almost same. We're gonna press this arrow down and we're gonna apply this modificator. Then one more thing to fix the shading. We're gonna right click on the model in object mode and select shade out of smooths, which will add another modificator that will fix some problems with normals.

And you can see the model already look better. And also we're gonna press tab or go to edit mode, press M on the keyboard and select by distance, which gonna fix the most annoying problem of AI generated model, merge not connected vertices. And you can see it removed just 20 ,000 vertices. You can also do that before decimation. All right, we got first one ready and let's move on to the next. So we're gonna position it a little bit higher.

Again, I used tilde on the keyboard to set the front view. You can also use this gizmo object here to set the correct view. And I'm gonna drop next object. Next object will be pants. All right, let's position it and let's do basically the same operation. I gonna do collapse. All right. After that, we also do a smooth by angle to fix some normal problems. If you see that's not enough and it looks a little bit too blurry on some areas, you can add modificator called normals, weighted normals, and you're gonna need to put it after smooth angle and activate keep sharp.

And here you can see the difference. It actually highlights some edges, not making them too blurry, which is actually what I want here. All right, now let's position it a little bit, just moving things around, rotating the camera with the wheel. Now let's drop another model, which will be glows here. We're gonna need a little bit extra effort to delete some part of one existing model. So first of all, let's rename the object.

Let's do the same operation. I gonna decimate it. I gonna add out a shading smooth by angle and also weighted normals. And of course, don't forget to jump into edit mode and merge vertices by distance, which will liquidate a lot of potential problems. Let's position the glow correctly. All right, so I'm gonna using hotkeys. You can use the gizmo control here is very simple. After whole two minutes, I actually got it in place, set scale a little bit.

I also will add a mirror modificator because my body is perfectly centered. Put it in first in order. I gonna select the mirror object as top and I gonna select the Y axis. And here we go. You can see that my glow is actually mirrored on the other side. Let's delete the old part. And here I can show you one cool thing. We gonna press on knife and we're gonna select bisect. So here you basically go to edit mode of our top.

And with pressing right mouse button, you basically draw a line how to cut it. Okay. Then you confirm the action. Next up, press the right mouse button and choose mark seam. That will basically mark edges are sharp and we're gonna need it to select that part we want to cut. We're gonna select approximately and press control L on the keyboard. And that will select all the areas until those marked seam. Lastly, press X or delete and choose faces.

Boom. We just deleted the hand. Now let's just position finally the glow. And here we go. I going to do exactly the same for the right hand. Perfect. Now the last part with the glows, we gonna go to mirror modificator. And since the mirror modificator basically adds an object, but it's still active. So we're gonna apply, you can hover the cursor and press control A or do it in the way I showed before. Now let's drop the head in.

Okay, here we go. Now, before we continue with assembling, I want to show you how to address some problems with texture. And we have some actually with the head, you can see there is some problems with the eye. Those are covered with the helmet, but from some angles, you can definitely see. And there are some imperfections in some areas inside like this one, like this one here, here and here to address it. We're going to use modif, which is an amazing free tool to fix texturing and for texturing in general.

It is very simple. We're going to go to modif. We're going to go create new project can be private or public. Just drop the GLB model here, select your object and press import 3D. Now, when it's done, we're going to go to texture mode right here and let's add some reference image in this menu. So we're going to add the head model here. All right. And the process here looks very simple. You basically add a reference or references depending on the view.

Then you basically select this tool and paint the area that you want to fix. For example, I want to address eyes and neck area here. Then we're going to press generate image here. And after a while, it will basically create an image. If we're happy with the result, we can select the patch tool and paint off top of the masking area to add that missing texture. And here you go. Look how simple it is to fix something here in modif.

I fixed the neck. I added the eyes just in one go, guys. Can you imagine that? And the process here looks simple as this. You basically change the view, regenerate the image here. When you have a good result, just go and paint on top. I fixed the nose a little bit from the sides as well. And guys, I have another dedicated video about 3D tools, which also includes full guide about modif. The video will be here. Take a look and let me know how you like it.

All right. So here we go. It's done. I really like the result. It's much cleaner, less artifacts. I fixed almost all the bottom thing. And now we can basically go to three dots, export and export as GLB. We can also export separately the texture image and just replace it in Blender without replacing the object. And here I want to show the comparison between and after modif. Just look how cool is that? It's the same object exactly.

But here you can see we fixed the eyes and how cool it can be. We fixed this area. It's now. But we kept the original thing here, which is already great. I'm not going to fix all the objects, but you can do that with every part and nail it until perfection. That's really don't take a lot of time. And now let's drop the updated head into the Blender back to our file. Let's position head. And here we go. We're actually doing it.

Obviously, we're going to need to do the same thing. Decimation, smooth by angle, weighted normals, all the things as before, keep sharp and make it look really good. And the last part, we're going to add the armor plate. I'm going to position them first like this. All right. Also, guys, when you import objects from any 3D AI generated, they might have this annoying grouping, which you can see here, the world. Just select the object in 3D scene and press Alt P and choose clear and keep transformation.

That will basically detach it without changing and you can delete the group. OK, we have the armor. Now we're going to do the same exact things, but to position it easily, we're going to go to edit mode and we're going to delete one half. And when you're in the edit mode to make sure it is selected, correct, make sure you have the X -ray mode activated here. And when you selected that object, you can press P on the keyboard and choose selection that will basically separate an object into two so you can control them easier without going to edit mode like I'm doing right here.

Also, after such a separation, you can press right mouse on the object, set origin and origin to center of mass, which will position this gizmo in center of the object. And with controls or with hotkeys, that will be easier to position it. OK, so I position it right. And now let's add the mirror as before. Make sure the mirror modificator is first select a top object as a case and do the same thing for top plates. Then we're going to apply the mirror modificator and control J to join them in one object called armor.

Here it is. They are perfectly positioned and that's super cool. Now, before we move to the next step, let's do one last thing. Let's press on each object and go to material tab and give their reasonable name to each of the material because we're going to need to restore them later after rigging. I will call it M head, which is material head. I will do exactly the same for all the materials when it's done. Let's also make sure we applied all the rotations.

You can see it if you press on the item here and it should be one, one, one everywhere here. If it's not like on the head object, you can simply press control A, which will open the menu like this and choose rotation and scale. That's very important step when you transfer object between different software like from blender to mixamo, 3ds max, exporting FBX or GLB. And finally, we can select all object by pressing A and press control G and join them in one object.

Finally, let's export it as FBX. You're going to choose the setting selected objects and the rest settings is pretty much default. All right, FBX format needed for mixamo. Let's move there. This is a very simple step. I also have a dedicated video about it, explain all the details and how you can adjust it. But basically we're going to drop the FBX model here. Wait a bit until it's processed. Then on this screen, make sure the character facing on us press next, place the markers as suggested here on the screen.

Very easy. And when it's done, just press next. After a while, we get our character rigged. It has a preview animation. If all looks good, press next here. You can preview it in different animations or export it as the way you want. I'm going to find a T-pose animation and export it like this for just press download export. Now we're not going to use a default animation, but we're going to create our own animation from a video using AI.

So I recorded video like this, where I am basically fitting all the frame and there's animation. I'm swinging with the briquette, but I assuming that's a sword. And for this, we're going to use quick magic AI, which is extremely simple to use. We're going to quick magic and we're going to drag and drop the video I just did right here. It works super fast. We're going to assign the character Mixamo V2 since we're using Mixamo skeleton.

All right, now let's press next button. And here we're going to select how we want to generate the motion. Here you can see the settings I used. You can experiment with different settings as well. And after a while it is processed and we can actually preview the animation on the Mixamo character here. Here how it looks actually very nice. Look, it actually, it follows my animation exactly, which is super cool. And we of course can download the animation.

And finally, let's actually apply this animation on our character. So the first thing I will drop the character from Mixamo that we downloaded. I will drop it here and you can see it's in T -pose and it has armature. So we're going to move our character to the backup folder. And here we just need to reassign the materials. All right. Since we gave them a reasonable name, it's not difficult to do. Okay. Before we import the animation from quick magic, let's rename the armature.

So they do not have the same name and let's call it arm character. And now let's drag and drop the FBX animation here. Okay. So here we have the character. What we need from it is animation track. So we can create an animation collection and just put it there and hide it for a while. Now we can go to the armature itself of the character, go to dope shit and select the action editor here. Here's how you get here in timeline.

You can set correct frame and in action editor, we can actually assign the animation track. So here you can see there is just one frame with yellow dot means that there is only animation key there. And here we can see the dropdown list where we can choose a different animations. And this one we can call armature. This one we can call T-pose the current one. We can choose the AI animation. And if we scroll the timeline, then nothing happened because we also need to select our armature called arm.

And now we can see the animation is actually working. Amazing job. And now the last part missing is actually the sword. So I'm going to show you a time -lapse how I basically did exactly the same as I did for the character. And I combined the into one object. I also adjusted the material a little bit to make it a little bit more reflective. And here's how to connect it and to be affected by animation. So I positioned the blade here.

You can see on the time-lapse how I did it. And inside blender, we're going to go select this object, go to constraints and select the child off. And here we're going to select the character armature, the skeleton as an object. And in bones, we're going to find the right hand bone and you can see it already is some glue line, but the thing is it resets the offset. So we're going to need to position it once again. I will do that real quick.

Okay. I also did a quick minor tweaks of animation frames. So the blade rotation follows the desired angle and our blade is actually moving with the hand. How cool is that? Of course, each step can involve a lot of tweaks if you know what you're doing. And again, guys, I have like three YouTube episodes about how to master that on the beginner's level, to be able to tweak any AI model, check it out. And now I'm going to go prepare renders.

And here you can see the final result. How cool is that? Almost every step was done with AI. Of course, you might say it's not perfect. There's a lot of problems. Every 2D AI artist can do that from scratch within an hour, of course. But in reality, that's a big, big job. That's a very difficult to learn. And for those who want to create, this is an amazing opportunity right now to try it out. And I have a lot of more amazing content, such as AI Pro versus 3D Artist, where we're going to figure out how long it takes and how much AI saves time.

Haters going to hate, but we're going to create. Like and subscribe. See you soon.