Blender addon for Concept Art - QUICKCURVE!

hey guys welcome to this video for a quick curve this is the latest tool in our quick tools collection which is a series of add-ons that drama jurabai and i have been working on for over a year um these add-ons that we've been building together are you know really for concept artists by concept artists and this is just one video of many that will be coming to show like all the possibilities all of the little features and ways that you can just bring your ideas to to life by drawing in 3d and so as this little preview plays you saw the samurais the characters the trees the tree being drawn uh you see this tool is really all about drawing in 3d and we're just trying to make that process as fast and as simple as possible um trying to take drama's workflow that he's been you know working on since all the way back in 3d code to vr and now it's a blender with grease pencil and we're just trying to streamline that and automate that so this video is just a simple feature walkthrough and then drama will be doing tutorials and i will be doing a part two and uh on this video and we'll just be going into more detail we'll be making more videos about the other quick tools and we're constantly you know refining and adding new features and um i hope you guys get some use out of this basic video and then please stay tuned for many more videos coming soon thank you so once you've installed quick curve in the end panel you'll see the shortcuts and to activate it you will press control f and now you're going to see ui pop up you're going to see a few more hotkeys appear and you can basically just start drawing so i'm just showing another little hard surface example this time i mean you can do anything with it really you can do the organic stuff you can do a hard surface you can use it for kind of quick designs and then to clean up later or you can just you know start and be a little more precise and have a finished product it's really up to you and that's really the fun part you know you just draw and you have a 3d mesh so besides the round brush you also have a square brush you can press alt d and it'll switch to square you can also switch by pressing ctrl d having this pi menu you can switch here but i tend to just press alt d so another thing is the drawing method right now is kind of this freehand you can press l and switch it to line where you press and then while i'm holding you get this you can let go and then every time you click it'll create a new point and then you middle mouse to confirm it you can also while holding left you can middle mouse and you'll get a two point curve you can press backspace to delete you can press delete to delete the first point it'll it says all this stuff right here and then again middle mouse to confirm you can also press shift or hold shift and then while you draw it'll be your freehand and then go back to line in order to change the brush size you're going to press f and then hold it and then move the mouse left and right then you're going to let go of f that's your new size so by default this direction is set to towards you and this is a very important setting so you'll see it starts at the cursor and goes towards the view if you do away from view it's going to go back i find this more useful for characters and then this one is more useful for when you're doing details then also neutral is great for most general drawing you'll just have it in the middle and then so we have this shift and by pressing shift m you have pressure so if you press lightly press strongly it'll draw based on your pressure but then sometimes you don't want that and you just want that like perfect precision you turn on tapering for like hair grass or something and this will do it at the start so you draw start this is with control p so this one it's going to taper the other way and then both will just taper both ends so custom we will cover later cyclic is very self-explanatory it's just going to create a cyclic curve the random size is uh basically you press shift t you hold it switch it just like the brush size and now it's going to choose randomly between this size and this size this is a great way to get some variation and as long as it's zero it'll just stick to the f size so by default you'll notice that this is a bizet curve and it has a decent amount of points but if you go and change this you kind of don't get anything and this is something that we're going to work on later but for right now i just wanted to cover a little workaround so this resolution right now it just samples kind of the rate at which you are moving your mouse so if you change this down it'll sample less often so you'll get less points but you still won't have this again we're going to fix that but for now if you happen to want to edit this curve you'll just go down here and change this resolution and now see you get you get all the good busy stuff but that wasn't really our prior priority with this first release this one it's all about you know just drawing exactly what you draw so you're not hopefully going to need to edit it but what you can do is you can erase so if you hold ctrl and you draw it'll cut so that is actually really useful and pretty cool and now merge to active we'll just make sure everything is the same curve and there is also this kind of hidden feature if you go into edit mode and you draw it'll connect with your previous line and that's regardless of if merge to active is on so when you're in line mode if you press control d you'll get this kind of menu we'll cover all of this but for now just look at anagon snapping and what this does is it'll just snap the line mode you can do this kind of hard surface type of details or like cables pipes whatever and an alternative to this and this is this crazy idea that drama came up with in quick deform so this is not in quick curve you know you can just use what i just showed you but if you want something a little bit cooler in quick deform you can turn on first turn on smoothing amount which just works as uh kind of a lazy mouse for a freehand drawing but then if you just set this something and then you do something like this 45 for the snapping angle and this is again this is for freehand not for line you get the same thing as that snapping line but you can do it like freehand like how cool is that it just draws and it'll just snap this is like the same type of thing but so much faster than having to manually go in here just change this like so much slower oops yeah way faster so that's really cool very excited about this and kind of improving it and seeing you know where we can take this idea but there's another thing that's really awesome about this and i'm going to cover the work plane in a second but just for now i'm going to press w it'll just snap to the plane so it'll draw in the perspective of this plane whoa this is really exciting switch over press alt d do square perfect perspective do some door some pipe whatever very cool okay so now it's a good time to turn that off and go into the workplane so by default it'll be in this align view which means it just draws from the viewport and i know it's kind of confusing to people like what the depth is so what you'd want to do is you want to imagine this plane that's at this cursor location so wherever your mouse kind of intersects with this plane that's where it's gonna where the depth is gonna be so this is set towards view so you would expect that it's going to be on top of the plane facing towards the view that i drew from so if you're here what you're going to get is this plane you want to kind of imagine that it's rotated towards you so then when you draw see it's like that that's going to be the depth the depth is the 3d cursor if you want to change it like to here now you draw it's going to be here when it's at the origin it'll be here see so when you uh press w in the empty viewport that's how you do this view line if you press it in your over a face it will align to that face see i'm just pressing w w and then again to reset that into the view and it'll uh update the text and it should be pretty clear how it works and it'll actually align to the view so that's cool to the workplace and also something that's pretty cool is even though this is a bezier curve if you press w it'll still it'll still align when you press double when you press w and then control w i'm just going to do an automatic alignment and obviously you know if you have like a very high res scene or a ton of polygons this this mode is going to be very slow so this is kind of a an early phase type of thing and then you just do it manually by pressing w and one really useful thing probably the most useful for a quick curve is pressing alt w and this just means the first point that you start to draw that's going to be that's going to determine the depth so in this case it didn't hit any object so it's going to be the 3d cursor here i hit an object so it's going to be that face here i hit this so it's going to be over here this is very very useful and again it works with curves so you can kind of get it's like ladder effect and it's actually useful to have away from view here so then it's like you're drawing an arm or a hand and you know you're just spinning this around and everything's like lining up really nicely oh and then the other alt w is going to be again first click aligning these it's easier to see with square so see it's aligning these squares instead of when you have it on depth it's going to be aligned to the view so i hope that's clear control shift w it's going to just draw on the surface and one thing that this does which i really like is if you start here and then you draw off it's just going to clip it i hate how in default it'll like just snap to something and like to space like you don't want that you just want it to be on the surface so by pressing ctrl w you'll get a long normal and this basically lets you kind of draw things out of the normal instead of so let me show you this so when you're aligned to the face you're drawing it on the on the plane when you're doing it along normal and you draw it's like perpendicular growing out of it and this is great obviously for grass for a lot of just little details and it's pretty cool to see on a box you can go like here here here yeah it's pretty cool and last but not least with the work plane there's a couple of cool things so if you press the right mouse you can actually just rotate it so that whole like the way i drew along you can also just rotate it and now you have that and it's locked here you just rotate and as you so when you press the right mouse the kind of point that it's rotating around is going to be under your cursor so here we're going to rotate here you can see this little preview which is very helpful rotate here here it's going to rotate around this it's going to rotate around this and again the awesome part is it all works with the curves so you can draw something and then rotate around here draw it around here draw it and then right now it's kind of it's pressed right up against this plane if you hold ctrl and then right mouse and you move it up down you can separate it a little bit so you're getting a an offset see what this says this one i guess this isn't very useful for a quick curve this this was uh for a quick shape yeah it's not put it ctrl right mouse and all will rotate we'll spin it yeah you don't need that for a quick curve and then if you press alt and right mouse it's going to basically based on like which quadrant your mouse is in right now i'm holding alt and right mouse and i'm moving it you see it just snaps to the major axes that's a really useful way to quickly get get it like you can align the work plane to a face but then you want it to be facing this way even at that depth so that's how you get that and that's just something you know with muscle memory you can do that really fast but the work plan the major thing that you need to know is this stuff and then if you want you can rotate it by pressing right mouse and that is it except there's also reset to ground again this was more useful for quick shape we just kind of are using the same code but if you control alt shift w it'll just put it on the ground okay so that's the work plane so a lot of features there and um you know i encourage you to just try all this stuff out check out how it works check the video again if you need another explanation or to hear it again read these and um really it's just like if you use these tools for like an hour you'll know all of it because that's how we've we really tried to make it very understandable and clear so now we've covered uh everything here besides this custom which we're going to leave for last cover the work plane and now let's handle these settings in the lower right so just to start with when you um any settings that you change like right now you know we've got a random size we've got a size if you just press k it's going to reset it and i guess there's a bug that doesn't reset random size but we'll fix that the idea is you press k and it resets all everything to default so let's go and check out square brush to do this twist just because we're not going to see any twist on a round brush so if you draw this you'll see it's kind of aligned to the view if you press y you hold it you move left right you let go of y and now you draw you get a twisted mesh this is really really cool and this is how i uh did the twisty tree at the start that's just lower different you can go really crazy that's just too crazy pretty nice okay again k and you see y gets reset so now we can go back to circle and v is just going to be a random noise it kind of depends on the scene scale like all that stuff but for the most part this is really useful just to get some of that randomness although you probably want it to be kind of subtle yeah that's pretty nice and then just like here you have the random size where it applies it per stroke this is going to be a multiplier per stroke so if you do be very set this and then right here so each one is getting a random noise in between this value and this value okay pressing k and then another thing is so let's say you draw something here when you're this has to be inside quick curve as i mentioned all of these settings are all these hotkeys are inside quick curve so if you select it you press alt f change the size but when i say press it i mean uh again you press the button you hold it and then you move your mouse left and right and then you let go shift y is going to twist it it's really cool shift v is going to add noise control h is just going to straighten it by removing every point besides this first and last and then let's do a couple different examples here when you press shift h you kind of like pressing it once there's a little like loose circle and then as you hold it it gets a little bit better now eventually this will probably just be replaced with like a procreate style uh like when you hold it for a second it'll just turn into a perfect circle but for now this is what we have i still kind of like this way because it's it's not perfect which is kind of the whole point of what we're doing but yeah okay so in preparation for using this custom mesh i'm going to create three different examples first let's just use a circle uh bezier circle convert it to that let's draw some kind of shape something random it doesn't matter you do want cyclic on though and then let's just create a mesh i'll just use quick shape some kind of like pipe thing okay so now i've got these three examples so i'm going to start with so i'm in quick curve click doesn't matter you can have that off now and so when you have it selected and you press j you'll see that that change that changes and now you're going to be using a curve so when you draw your drawing with that curve you see that this is by the way where you would use the plane with pressure on and then along with normal this is a really nice way to do grass okay it's the detour so just go back okay so this uses the profile if you want to stop using the profile you just make sure that nothing is selected and then you press j and you're back to using you know whatever brush you have okay so now this one was the curve that we drew and you don't actually need to have to click on if but you can if you want and now we're gonna press j and that's gonna it's gonna take off the depth for you now you're gonna draw with that profile as well so you can manually create that or uh just draw it with quicker and it tries very hard to align properly i know the blender default alignment is just completely random it seems like so this tries to at least keep it consistent um but it's still a work in progress and then again select nothing press j it's reset and then last but not least you have this um you might no that there should be enough geometry there so if you press j with a mesh you will draw it's not aligned right so it seems like you have to do it like this let's try that y transforms yeah so that stuff is still not perfectly figured out in terms of alignment you might have to play with it but it seems like negative x is the front and then you apply transforms and so now you're drawing with this like pipe thing which is kind of nice and then in the control d menu there's some you can see that this deforms along the curve so in some cases you don't want that like let's say you want to draw with a monkey or an object press j it's gonna deform it and look really weird so what you do is press ctrl d you turn off this deform custom by curve and now it's gonna be like uh scattering along the curve type of deal and then as you can see here when you select it you press shift u you can change the copies and this works with the um if you have this on shifted u is just a global hotkey for that change copies and that is custom mesh again you turn it off and you're back to normal it's very useful we are still kind of working on this especially with the alignment it gets very tricky but it's already super useful for pipes scattering objects and especially drawing with the profiles is really really cool that's how i did the like ornamental part of the samurai that you'll see in part two so now let's cover the rest of the options in the control d menu so by default modifiers for active is actually on but i've turned everything off so material from active let's say you draw or you have an object and it has a material like it's red if you have material from active on and this is selected it will draw with that material if you don't have it selected it'll be default so this is kind of cool to switch between different materials immediately on your new mesh and then modifiers from active obviously does the same thing but for modifiers so let's say that you have like a subdivision on this you have a very smooth curve with this on as you draw this one will also get that subdivision and now where that comes into play and becomes really important uh are these things so first let's do revolve let's say you draw like that and it just immediately revolves for you and you can control these steps better but all it's doing is just adding this like screw modifier and stuff so the thing is you'll notice it turned it off because it creates an empty at the 3d cursor on that when you draw that shape so you don't want to be creating an empty every single time so the way it works is since this is selected and modifiers from active is on when i draw a new one it will be there if i deselect it and i draw it'll be back to normal if i select it again i can do that that's really nice and that's how all of these work like for mirror and array i know that this is this kind of system with like selecting it is a little bit confusing but the there are some really nice advantages such as if you place a cursor here and you go and turn this back on that's going to like restart this whole process but it's going to do it around this cursor now it's turned off so if nothing is selected it's not going to draw anything and the cool part about this is if i select this it'll go back to this cursor if i select this it'll go back to here you can get like these really complicated situations set up and especially with mirror that's more obvious so we're going to do a mirror it's going to draw now you select it and then let's say you want some kind of asymmetrical piece here so you mirror it you can work on this but then you're like oh i need to add some details to this select this and now this is going to go and the one disadvantage to this that you have to watch out for is if you turn it on and you draw then you ctrl z it's gone it doesn't say that so i hope that we can find a solution to this but you know worst case just treat it like that weird photoshop bug you know where it undoes the setting like just draw it and then you're gonna undo it at least you'll have that object as like a template for the mirror and then same thing for the array actually this mirror direction so you can see by default it uses the positive so if i draw here actually i just got hit with that there so if i draw here there's just not going to be anything if you turn this on and then flip mirror direction it'll work and then exact same thing for the cursor array if it's not selected it'll be not arrayed if you select it modifiers from active it's going to copy over i just wanted to briefly go over the preferences now installing it is just going to be like every other add-on and uh please if you're upgrading it make sure that you remove close blender reopen blender and then reinstall the new update so you have your colors here you have alt navigation if you need that you have this which will just always show the work plane grid you have the draw buffer size this is kind of important if you have a resolution or monitor size it's very different than mine basically it is the determine it's like the scale between are you selecting something or are you drawing and so how much you move the mouse is kind of this distance so you want to find something that works for you that will allow you to select things but then also to draw small objects the window buffer size is kind of a it limits a quick curve so that you can like go into the modifiers here and mess with the outliner and you won't be like drawing things off the screen but sometimes you might want to use this or change the end panel so you increase this and then that'll push the margins in so that you can edit those things excise will change the font of the you the size of the ui and the ngon snapping sensitivity only applies to line when you um kind of just when it snaps back to that first point okay guys thank you so much for watching and uh please subscribe if you'd like and just kind of stay tuned for the part two of this video where i go through how i build this um so this video was you know very basic just covering what every button does what every setting does and then part two for me will be kind of covering how i use it to create something like this and then i have other scenes that i've been building out with these guys and uh maybe i'll show some other stuff too because the you know for us what we really like about these tools that we built so far and our goal building them was the versatility and we hope that is coming across in the promos and the just the features um and one thing that we're very proud of is the discord channel that we've built out and you can really see it kind of speaks for itself just the variety of like characters environments creatures environments um all kinds of different stuff like just little you know vignette pieces uh little environment props kind of hard surface or like large-scale things and we're all you know people are contributing and it's been really totally unexpected but i'm very proud of it and so everything will be in the description we hope you'll check it out and yeah okay thank you

Channel: ALKSNDR

Views: 89,400

Keywords: blender, b3d, conceptart

Id: iFStO83_jxc

Length: 31min 43sec (1903 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020