Adding Decals to 3D Models - Blender 2.8 Tutorial

decals are small pieces of artwork predicted somewhere on your 3d model their advantages are as any detail they make the object looks more interesting there are many different ways to apply a decal in blender from using the shrink wrap modifier to going through the whole texture paint workflow my name is T WA Berlin for CG kuku calm and the metal that will show you is non-destructive and rather quick so you can use it during any stage of your project alright let's get started the first thing to do is to make sure a specific add-on is turned on so let's go on your preferences and make sure dad name import images as plain is activated now let's use it immediately and click on file import and you can see this new option their image is as plain and for this exercise we're going to use the cg cookie loop let's take a closer look to what we just imported so the image looks fine but alpha layer is completely black we can fix that by changing the blend mode from opac to alpha blend and now the Alpha layer is completely see-through a cool thing with this add-on is that it automatically generates a basic decal shader which is well basically a mix shader' between a transparent and a diffuse using the color and alpha layer to combine them okay back to the modeling mode now we're going to well place our decal and it's going to be a little bit tricky if we just use the grab button so for that I recommend strongly using the snapping mode and setting the snapping to face using the center targets and align the rotation to target that way if we hit G and hold ctrl the normal of the decal will automatically match the normal of the target so let's try to move it around like this one important thing when placing your decal is to make sure that it will properly project itself to the target in this case for example the project son will go a little bit over so we might have a lot of deformations on the final results using the orthography view and aligning the decal that way would provide much better result okay so now we can rearrange rated with its position and in order to properly project it we're going to steal a little bits of the targets geometry in order to get a one-to-one identical mesh so that's the first trick we need to shift D duplicate the target and then we can select the decal and go to the local view so in order to steal the geometry we're going to use a boolean modifier so let's add it on a modifier tab select the operation to intersect and the object we're going to intersect is is the decal itself the result is zero since the decal has no thickness so let's fix that by adding a solidify modifier and increase the thickness and that way we can get the exact amount of surface we need you can stop adding the thickness once you see the complete rear face of the solidified decal now we can apply the boolean modifier and do some geometry cleaning since we don't need these faces I'm like showing here with the grease pencil so let's jump to the edit mode select the rear face and delete all the vertices and now we have the exact minimum amount of surfaces we need to project the decal on a target we can also remove the solidify modifier and now we're ready to go in order to fix now the next step is to fix the shading so we can select the target and then the decal and hit ctrl L in order to make linked materials to both of the object next step is to fix the UV mapping of the target and we're going to use a very convenient option in blender so let's select the decal first the target first and then the decal hit shift 7 to align the view to the decals normal we can then also hide the detail now and focus on the target so to fix the mapping we can select all the faces hit U and use the option project from view which will unwrap the target as we see it on the viewport which means exactly aligned with the decal we can rename the targets while CGC logo applied and move it to another collection just for the sake of having things clean now let's leave the local mode and see how it looks the projection is really good but there is still some issue of course it's a bit deformed since the decal is pretty big compared to the compared to the coverage of the target but there's another issue I want to focus on right now is the fact that the faces are completely overlapping so we have some shading problems like the ones I'm like highlighting here not good but it's pretty easy to fix this averting issues it's basically just adding a displacement modifier to offset just a little touch the decal so let's reduce the strength to something very low like 0.0001 and then we're happy with the result if you want to make some fine-tune we can go to the UV editing mode jump to the Edit menu edit mode sorry and when we select all the faces and scale them or rotate them we can well fine-tune the decal itself so this process is very convenient and it can be used in any situation like for example if you have two objects like the green one and the yellow one and hold on a second so let's move again and it doesn't seem that the decal is following the tiger so we can fix that very quickly by selecting the decal and set it and like parenting it to target that way they move together sorry so back to the to object the green one and yellow one we're going to reproduce the workflow so I'm going to accelerate a little bit take photo for the time being so I pulled the image place it here we can see that the decal is not completely overlapping the target but that does really matter since it will only involve the Alpha part the transparent part so no big issue duplicate the targets select the decal jump to the local view add the boolean modifier and now my favorite parts solidify to decal and increasing the thickness yeah you can see on the yellow target that since the decal is not completely covering the surface the boolean shows a little bit different result but that's actually for the best since it will be less geometry to clean now for the mapping there's another method that can be used it's to use another body fire named the UV project and use what the decal of course as a projector and then off and then the trick is to apply the modifier so let's redo it for the other target and apply apply and let's hide the decal and take a closer look the scale is just incorrect so we can also benefit from the multiple objects select in blender and select both of the target rows the target and then scale their UV at the same time in the UV editor so both method works I find the first one a little bit more intuitive but it's up to you to to do how you prefer and let's not forget to the displacement modifier and also parents the two decal to the targets time to wrap things up this method is extremely powerful the decals are sticking perfectly and seamlessly to a target you can still edit your target model and none of the modifier that you might have been using had to be applied it's really convenient and you just have to go to follow through these nine steps on both the target and the decal since this workflow involves like very basic operation if you're into scripting I'm pretty sure it's very possible to generate a simple macro or even an add-on to to do that so to your keyboard if you feel like a programmer one last thing in real life decals are usually small so you don't need to import the telemeters time 25 metres decal and which also means that you don't need to import images with very high resolutions finally you also notice that in real life decals usually applies on flat area in order to avoid deformation so keep that in mind while you when you do that to your models otherwise have fun projecting as many decals as you want on your favorite object and see you next time

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 127,007

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender 3d, decals, 3d models, blender tutorial, decal, 3d decal, blender 2.8

Id: nhOPvj1DbVQ

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019