u/Certain_Friendship16

A stylized vehicle combat game being built in Unreal Engine 5 by an indie developer using AI-generated 3D assets with Rodin gen 2.0 Hyper 3D

The workflow is surprisingly straightforward: rough ideas and scratch designs are first refined into clean references in NanoBanana, then generated into 3D assets using Rodin Gen 2.0, followed by Smart Low Poly mode for AI retopology before moving into Blender and Substance Painter for texture rebaking, cleanup, and final adjustments.

One of the most useful parts of the workflow has been rodin smart low poly mode it actually produces very clean and usable topology, making the assets much easier to work with afterward and significantly reducing the amount of manual cleanup normally needed.

The final project is assembled and polished inside Unreal Engine 5.

I tested the retopology in the new Rodin Gen 2.5, and honestly, I was surprised by the result.

The original mesh had almost 2 million polygons and pretty messy topology. Rodin managed to optimize it down to around 3,000 faces while keeping the overall shape readable and producing a much cleaner quad-based mesh.

It is obviously not a perfect final production mesh, but as a starting point, this is actually very useful. You can treat it almost like a clean base mesh or blockout and continue modeling, refining, baking, or rebuilding details from there.

The PBR textures also came out pretty decent, which makes the result feel more complete instead of just being a simplified mesh with no usable material information.

Stats:

• Input: almost 2M polygons
• Output: around 3K faces
• Cleaner quad-based topology
• Decent PBR textures
• Useful as a base mesh / starting point for further work