All tutorials

The full 3D pipeline, end to end

Advanced 45 min

Take one asset from a blank sphere to a playable scene across Sculpt, Retopo, Pigment, Render and Engine, without exporting a single file by hand.

What you'll learn#

You will run one asset through the entire 3D pipeline in a single session: Sculpt, Retopo, Pigment, Render, Engine. The point is not any individual module, it is that the asset never leaves the app and you never manage a file by hand.

This tutorial assumes you have done the five before it. It moves fast and focuses on the joins between modules, which is where pipelines usually break.

Before you start#

  • The five previous tutorials in this series.
  • The five modules of the chain are backed modules. Only Inkwell, Vectra and PDF Studio are free.
  • Browser support is not uniform, and it is worth knowing before you start: Retopo and Pigment run on WebGL, Sculpt and Engine prefer WebGPU and fall back to WebGL, and Render requires WebGPU outright.
  • Set aside one uninterrupted session. The pipeline is worth seeing end to end in one go.

The chain#

Sculpt  →  Retopo  →  Pigment  →  Render
                            ↘
                             →  Engine

Each arrow is a Send to action. A module can only send to modules that accept its asset type, which is why the menu only ever offers valid destinations.

Steps#

  1. Block out your asset in Sculpt. Silhouette first, then the large masses, then the creases. Stop before you are tempted to add fine detail: the bake in step 5 carries it, and time spent polishing a sculpt that gets retopologised is time spent twice.

  2. Use Send to Retopo. The high-poly arrives as the reference surface. Nothing was exported, and nothing landed on your disk.

  3. Run Auto Retopo at a low target, then fix the areas it got wrong by hand. Check the UVs before you leave. This is the single most common place to lose an hour later.

  4. Use Send to Pigment, and keep the sculpt. You are about to need it.

  5. Bake from the high-poly onto the low-poly: normal, ambient occlusion, curvature, thickness. This is the moment the two meshes justify their existence, and it is the join that makes the whole pipeline worth running.

    Warning: if you deleted the sculpt after step 3, you cannot bake. There is no way to recover that detail from the light mesh.

  6. Build the material: a fill layer for the base, generated masks for edge wear and dirt, hand painting only where the generators cannot infer what you want.

  7. Branch. Use Send to Render for a presentation image, or Send to Engine to put the asset in a playable scene. Most assets go both ways, and both start from the same textured mesh.

  8. In Render, set an HDRI, rotate it until the form reads, add a key light for shape. Render, and save the scene so the next asset reuses the setup.

  9. In Engine, place the prop, add a Collider, add a Rigidbody if it should move, and press Play.

  10. Close the loop. Right-click the prop in the Scene Graph, use Edit in to open it in Sculpt or Pigment, make the change, and watch it come back into the scene. This is the part that makes the pipeline a loop rather than a one-way street: you can fix an asset from the place where you noticed the problem.

  11. Save with Save to Cloud at each stage. The project follows your account rather than one machine.

Result#

One asset, five modules, zero manual file management. More importantly, you now have a loop: when the prop looks wrong in the game scene, you fix it from the game scene, and the fix propagates back.

Going further#

  • Run the pipeline again on a harder subject, something with hard surfaces and mechanical detail rather than an organic form.
  • Bring Matter in to generate PBR channels from a reference photograph and feed them into Pigment or Engine.
  • Build a scene around the prop with the terrain editor, then light it with Sky & Atmosphere.
  • Add sound with Pulse, and cut a presentation video in Fusion.