Blender Intermediate Tutorial - How to Sculpt Details

and now what's this if I just lightly tap right here I can very easily just create the illusion of a well-worn edge like something that's been hit with a hammer or it's scraped against something and I'm just lightly just tapping it like that in this tutorial we are gonna be making these chips and scrapes and little Nick's and you know the stuff the stuff that really gives the anvil its character so this same method could be used for cars robots a whole bunch of things it's it's adding surface detail and it's needed for a lot of things that you model so yeah this this on this is where we finished at the end of the last video we had UV unwrapped our beautiful anvil which is great now we're gonna do some sculpting now for my my more experienced viewers out there might be wondering why on earth are we why did we do the UV unwrapping first and now we're gonna do sculpting surely it should be the other way around well actually we are going to be sculpting on a separate mesh and then we're going to be baking that detail in the next video onto the mesh that we have here so we've you unwrapped it for a reason so that when we do the baking it's okay but yeah in this video let's let's do some let's do some sculpting okay and if that made no sense to you don't worry that's just for the people that did understand it okay so we do not need we do not need the UV image editor so I'm gonna collapse that or just make it the properties bar that's good and we're gonna change this to solid view and before we do any sculpting at all I just want to make one little change to our mesh here because I noticed that looking at a lot of reference photos but that's see this edge here is a little bit too soft like if you look at at this reference photo for example you can see that that edge there is pretty it's tight and I think it's usually used like it has to be pretty sharp because um what do they do with it they like have a Hema stuff with it and it has to make it like a 90 degree angle and if it was smooth it wouldn't quite work as well anyways all that is to say is I'm just gonna grab this edge here by holding down alt and clicking which is a good reminder turn on that screen Keys tool and I'll just deselect those two vertices there so they don't move double tap G and that's gonna slide it up and then I'm just gonna do the exact same thing here double tap G dude and this one here as well deselect that one on that one double tap G and look at that we have a nice tight edge and it looks extra sharp just one thing though make sure that that because that's that's part of the edge that's part of that circle so we don't want that to move but that's good okay that looks extra sharp and good so I mentioned something about baking so we're gonna do it in the next video but it's important at this stage that you take a a copy of this mesh and move it to a new layer so we're gonna hit shift D then hit escape and then I'm gonna hit em to move it and I'm just gonna move it to the second layer okay so layer 1 and layer 2 you'll have the exact same mesh so on layer 1 this is the only one we're gonna work on for this tutorial but we're gonna do all the sculpting and I'm gonna do it all messy and we won't care that we're ruining the UV map that we did in the last tutorial that we're making a mess of everything because we're just gonna bake it in the next video and if baking doesn't make any sense don't worry it will when we get that ok so we're gonna do some sculpting um now if we were to just jump and do some sculpting like right now what you would find is that there's not a lot of detail here right and that's because it's working off of this detail that we have here and it's not a lot of detail so what we want to do instead is apply our subsurf modifier and now once it is applied now when you draw you can see that you have more detail to work with now one thing before we get into any of the details you'll notice that into the mie huh that's fine um you'll notice that if you look at the reference photos that like on this one here you can see that by the way these reference photos if you want them linked to that is in the YouTube description but these it's got like what appears to be a lot like hammering all over it so it's just like wobbly bent it's just a bent bent piece of metal right like that's the anvil to do all this to just get hit with hammers all day long so it's just got marks all over it so you could do that with the skull brush you know but that's that's quite tedious and as artists we want to be lazy that's that's the way to because that's when you actually do time-saving things so so what I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to add a displacement modifier right here which will make it look inflated we're gonna give it a new texture which will make it look deflated and then go to the texture panel here change it to displacement texture change it from image to clouds and now you can see what we what we're aiming for the strength is way too high by default so I'm gonna drag that down to a really low value and I actually think something around point zero one five is gonna do the job so it's just a light battering all the way over not too much because you don't want there to just be detail uniformly across everything that's really what the the sculpting thing is gonna be for but this is just you know a light battering so I'm gonna hit apply on that which means that it's app now actually gonna be part of our wireframe they'll be very slightly bent around okay cool so sculpting let's do some sculpting now that we've done now they've got all this ready if I just start drawing here you will see that I am drawing and sculpting into our mesh so sculpting right all the options are in the toolbar which you enable and you access by hitting T on your keyboard now the first thing to note is that as you draw here you'll notice that it's drawing it in two places its sculpting here but it's also sculpting there why is that it's almost like it's got a mirror modifier applied well it's not the mirror modifier but it is underneath here when you're sculpting by default it's got the option mirror X turned on in symmetry which wouldn't be a bad thing if you know every single asset you worked on was on the correct axes but it's often not and sometimes you don't want things mirrored so I personally think it shouldn't be on by default it should be off in our case though what we do I see when we do want it mirrored but we don't want to left-to-right like that we want it across the y-axis so I'm going to click Y and now when I draw over here you can see it's drawing it over there so this is obviously the way it's supposed to go because yeah even though you know technically you shouldn't MIT like if you're if there's a dent on this side there's not necessarily gonna be a dent on the exact same spot on the other side but it will be so unnoticeable from the point of view of the camera that and it'll save you so much time you won't have to do double the work over here that it's definitely worth doing so that's why we're gonna do it okay so as you as you draw draw as you sculpt you know I'm just clicking as I do this you'll see that it's actually physically changing the the geometry so that's that's what the sculpt tool will do which you know might sound like ah you know that's why is that such a big deal well you often work so much with modifiers and things that it's rare to see the geometry actually moving around but it is but what that means is is that it's actually gonna base it off of what you've got in the wireframe here so that means that if I was to draw right here for example you can see that it's quite blocky and the reason for that is that there isn't a lot of detail here whereas if I was to draw right here there still no not a fantastic amount of detail but there is more there because we've got more detail along that edge so what that's actually quite annoying if you're if you are a sculpting person if you're a sculpting artist I check I move that out the way now you don't want to have to think about the detail like as just sculpting wherever you want to be able to put you know some detail here detail here detail up here and you don't want to have to think about you know is there enough underlying detail underneath it so there is an awesome tool in the sculpting tool this tool bar right here right here there's one called Dyne topo which stands for dynamic topology and what it does is if you enable it it'll give you a scary warning and that's because we've got UV unwrapping information part of the mesh but doesn't matter which if you enable this it will destroy that information it doesn't matter because we've got it on layer 2 how's this fine but when you use dynamic topo what it will do is it will dynamically REIT apologize the mesh as you draw what does that mean well instead of it actually using this wireframe information here you can see that on the area that I drew then it's hard to tell because as long as the same level of detail as that but it's actually adding in detail and what that means and it's based off of where you are like how close you are to the mesh so if I was to zoom in further like right here and if I was to oh did I lose it I did if I was to draw it again you can see that I'm able to get extra detail on that little point right there so it's really really a really powerful feature it's they have a same thing in ZBrush it's it's great when you're just trying to work out the shape of something you don't want to have to worry about the topology or any of that stuff you just want to just put stuff in there knock holes in it add detail where it is that your Scotland so you like you're working with a piece of clay because somebody working with piece of clay they don't have to worry about is there enough detail in this clay it's clay so that's what this essentially does so it's it's great for that now the lower that you set this value here too the more detail you get because it's based off of you know how close you are to the objects so it's the number of pixels on your screen that is required before it uses another level of detail and it's the best way to think of it so instead of 12 I'm going to set this to 2 and now when I draw here you will see that I'm getting a much finer level of detail right if you go into edit mode look at that so that's why this is so powerful you don't have to worry about the detail anymore it's just doing it all automatically and it's it's just crazy you won't have to keep checking the box by the way it's just because I keep hitting on do so under that as well oh and click smooth shading as well so you don't have to see the ugly y frame underneath it okay so that's so we talked about symmetry we talked about dynamic topology that's good the brush the main brush so that is the the most important thing I guess as you're sculpting something the default one is this one called sculpt draw which sort of like if you're drawing something with a paintbrush it'll draw it and raise it to that level if you'll see that there's an ad and then there's a subtract button there if you hold down control and this works for any of the brushes if you hold down control and then draw it will do the opposite of whatever this is set to so it's set to adds the holding down control makes it subtract and if I set it to subtract and then hold down control it will add hopefully that makes perfect sense so basically as you're sculpting it's very common to you know click click ctrl click control ctrl click click click and to switch between the two very very often so I'll be doing that as I work just yeah I know I know there's a lot of talking anything can come on get on with it but I'm just trying to explain it cuz this is a lot a lot of people the sculpting introduction anyways the one brush that I'm gonna use a lot in this video is the flatten brush and the reason it's so cool and the reason we're gonna use it is cuz it's good for like right on his edge here if I just click and go like that you'll see the effect that it's having it's almost like it's been hit with something because it's flattening out that corner really really powerful so what I want you to do is to just work your way along the anvil and just add a few places where it has been hit now the reason I say a few is that it's very tempting look at this to go like oh sweet this looks really cool I'll just do it I'll do heaps of these right and just like do this all the way along the problem is is that if you do it too much like let me show you what I mean right if you just do the same chip like all the way along repeatedly after a while it doesn't have any meaning anymore so I got this tip from a ZBrush talk that I ought to put the link in the description if you want to watch it it was by the the guys at Blizzard who made overwatch and they were talking about the character design and how they have areas of quiet and then areas of detail so the areas where there's not my like a quiet area is an area for your eyes to rest on and then the areas of detail is something for your eyes to focus on but you don't want to just have detail everywhere because it's too much for the eye to take in it doesn't know how to read the character very well and that applies to everything not just characters it applies to assets it applies to composition architecture a whole bunch of things so I want you to just very sparingly find a few places to put and do them at different sizes as well so do little ones do little chips all this this shortcut key that I'm using here by the way is F which is changing the radius the size of its you just hit F and then drag a bigger or smaller depending on what you want or you can change it up there as well now at this stage I should also talk about tablets don'tdon't umm tablets I know some of you watching you've only got a mouse and you're like no don't make me have to buy something else you don't need a tablet for this tutorial you can get by just fine just by clicking the only reason I want to bring up a tablet is that they are so so useful and they will rapidly speed up the amount of time speed up the time that you have to spend sculpting and it'll you excuse me while I throw my teabag away to to get better results because for example here if I wanted there to be a different sized chip I would have to click many many times I don't have to turn down the strength like if I want there to be a subtle one and just click a lot right however if I'm using a tablet see that little button next to it that enables the tablet pressure which means the more that I the harder that I click on it the you can see with more force that it's giving it more and more strength so I can very quickly without having to click multiple times and set that value really low I can decide right here like I want a really big one and then I want just a really light one a really small one and then a really deep one you know and and I can do all that just by pressing and it's so natural because it's you know everybody's used to drawing with a pencil and the harder you push something so it's it's not essential and if you're just getting started in blender I would recommend not buying a tablet until you are sure that for one even gonna continue with blender cuz you know you don't want to be one of those people that just rushes like I knew a friend in high school I wasn't calling my name he might be watching but he decided he was really into mountain biking and he went out and bought a really good mountain bike helmet pads convinced his whole family to buy all these mountain bikes and then within about a month he'd given it up and then they just sat in the garage I'm assuming gathering dust so you don't want to be like that with your hobbies make sure that before you go out and buy a tablet you actually do want one yeah this one by the way this is a Wacom Intuos if you're curious what mine is it's just a tablet the link for this specific one is in the YouTube description but really any any tablet will really do the trick you know Christmas you know it's it's September now Christmas is a few months away maybe you could put it on your list maybe someone will buy it for you you know there are worse Christmas presents there are a lot worse Christmas presents I'm actually thinking this year be the first year I'm thinking of just telling everybody don't buy me any gifts like for my family because I was thinking about like the economics of of present-giving right like when I was a little kid I remember like my granddad he was like man I don't want to buy anybody any presents and so we call him the the Scrooge like Scrooge ruining Christmas you know but now is I'm an adult I'm like wait a minute it makes it makes so much more sense for you to buy your own gifts than for someone to buy things like they did this study where they had a bunch of school kids and they went out and they randomly gave each of the school kids a um a treat like it was an American study so they had like you know Maas bars Baby Ruth Fig Newtons nerds a whole bunch of different lollies and then at the end of it they got the kids to rate how satisfied they were with the things that were given and on average the average rating out of 10 for a lolly that they were given for free was five and the reason for that is that some kids didn't like Ma's bars some kids Maas Bosworth at favorite thing ever some kids really hate sour things I mean so they got a sour Wally and so they had lower ratings and then they gave the kids the opportunity to swap their um swap their their candy with another one and they have like 60 seconds to do it and then the average rating went up to like a nine which is crazy and it's it's really it's simulating the economy economics of gift-giving which I thought was fascinating cuz I'm like yeah you know what like if I was to go and buy my wife a gift I know her better than anyone else does and yet chances are if I was to spend 50 bucks on her I would not buy the same thing that she would have bought for herself if she had 50 bucks to spend for herself so it's like it's a huge it's a waste on the economy and let me know in the comments what you think of gift-giving I don't know I'm very curious like I think it's one of those traditions which we should just leave to die like it's obviously the the incentive is put that it do it by people that are making money at Christmastime it's every company and of course every Christmas they're not gonna no one's gonna talk about the the effects of gift-giving and anyways just gonna get off my little soapbox here just killing some time whilst I do this sculpting okay so I I didn't abide in mind that by my own rule there and I overdid this area here so here's another little keyboard shortcut if you hold down shift and then as you draw it that is going to smooth it out so it's the exact same thing as if you were to select smooth there it's just a short key forward so it's holding down shift as you draw and it will do that it's a good idea not to smooth everything though they say that's a common mistake for beginners is that they try and like smooth out their mistakes and then you end up with just like a really smoothed out looking thing and it doesn't look right so you don't want to do that so use smooth sparingly okay so I've got a few little chips and now I'm just gonna choose a few of them just to make really big bald areas another one right here okay and that is pretty good okay so you can see like with some by doing it sparingly you give more emphasis to the to the dents and using like varied amounts like small ones and then big ones yeah it just it gives more character to it and it doesn't have like a uniform look to it that's that's the whole point of sculpting is is it gives it an organic hand-drawn sort of feel or like my hand-drawn like hand-drawn attention I don't know because like there's there's so many things in CG that's like generated use a general like procedural textures and things like that and we use that because it's so much work doing everything by hand but sculpting is the one area where you can really give it that that look as though it's some yeah it's not done by a computer like it's actually hand sculpted so that's why it's probably doing it okay now you can see by the way at this point right here like where where the area's come together you can see that that looks really obvious because that is mirrored right so instead of that what I will do is I'll just turn off whoops not dynamic symmetry just turn it off whilst I'm working on this area so that I can just draw on one side and not the other and it'll look it'll look better than if I hadn't done that okay I'm gonna do fast I'm gonna do a sped up thing now while I just finished this this same thing for the rest of the mesh here oh one other thing to mention before I jump to that is a madcap so like right down here you can see I'm about to start sculpting and it's very hard to see the detail because of the way that the mesh is shaded so if you go up to shading here by hitting n that's in the end four properties then click madcap this enables you to change how it looks in the viewport so it's not adjusting the material it's not changing anything to do with how it's gonna look when it's rendered this is purely just so that you can visualize it on your screen better so really just pick one which makes sense like I generally work with this pink one because it looks has quite nice shading on it but yeah it's really just pick whichever one you need in order to get the job done all right first time [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] okay so I have I've done those little hits pretty well all over and except for this back edge here but I can do that later you'll notice that I haven't done it on these underside ridges here those are perfectly clean and the reason for that is that it wouldn't make sense for there to be hammering on the underside of the anvil unless the anvil was flipped for some strange reason so make sure that your d and this goes for texturing modeling anything you do it has to make physical sense first like it has to fit a purpose so think of somebody using this where would they actually hit it don't just start battering it just all over like we did with the displacement at the start but you know what I mean like just think about it carefully otherwise you will end up with a very boring looking asset with just a uniform damage all over it excuse me so what I'm going to show you now is just adding some detail to this horn here because you'll notice if you use the flattened brush like it doesn't really work that well and also you get this sort of ribbed look here so if I change it back to the sculpt draw and if I hold down control this is where you're actually going to start using the control if I you know do a few hits here I can start to basically give it the look as though it's been hit with a hammer however I keep getting this ribbed look there and I don't know the exact reason that it does this but it's I think it's because it is a curved cylinder it's that when you actually do the the the hit right there it has to read to pologize it and somehow because it's a round cylinder you see those edges there so what I just do is I just hold down shift and I just paint over them and that's going to smooth them out there I'm sure somebody could explain to me why this specific shape it has problems reach apologizing but yeah so even though I've got that diner topper smooth shading thing turned on it was still still a problem so anyways hey why is that was dynamic topo not turned on before that's weird okay no it is there okay for some reason dynamic topo just turned off I wasn't sure if I had it turned off for the whole thing I'm sure I would have noticed but anyways I'll just smooth this out just continue smoothing it out and it's like once the detail is in there and once it's been smoothed out then it's okay so then you can switch back to the sculpt draw dynamic topo and now I can do those little hammer hits and there's not really a problem there that part is new so I have to do that but yeah so just do a few hits along here you might want to turn off the cemetery where it gets closer to the same so that it doesn't look too repeated you know what I mean smooth it out a bit and just making it look like it's been hammered look at that so authentic all right cool what else can I talk about I already talked about presents oh hey speaking of presents I don't know if it could be classed as a present but yeah I'm gonna be a dad how about that I just posted it on Instagram yesterday but yeah wife's pregnant having a baby girl in February so yeah look forward to last tutorials for me February but yeah that's that's on the way so that's something um cool hey now it's starting to look good I think good alright so what I'll do now is I'm gonna turn off dynamic topo and I'm just gonna add a few extra hits to the side here so holding down ctrl and I'm just bashing it in now the reason I'm turning it off is that if you have dynamic topo turned on and then I was to paint it near these edges here you'll get like distortion because it will try to retopo this high detailed area which I don't want so I'm doing this after I've already done some sculpting with the dynamic top oh I am yeah just making sure that I yeah I'm not losing that detail so I'm turning off dynamic topper all right cool holding down control just do a few hits along here again not uniform all the way over but oh gosh sorry alright a couple of hits here oh I got a turn on symmetry again I guess that's annoying when you forget that you've had it turned off for a while and then the other side doesn't have any of that detail that you did but alright it's not too bad this is the lazy part anyway we can just hit it a few times cool now the other thing that I will do is I will use the tool which is called the pinch tool and I will just go along these edges here and I'll just sharpen out those edges let me just send to this there we go so it's easier to rotate around it okay um why is that not working oh I'm magnifying up a holding down control okay don't hold down control while you're doing the pinch thing because it will flip it and it'll be magnified which will not look right but you can see that look I'm doing this I'm just giving a sharpened edge to those areas there now in the next step we're gonna be adding in some textured detail so these don't look stylized but yeah let's do another time-lapse while I finish off and complete this detail bit okay so I've pretty well finished the the main part the main hits where it's been hit with a hammer now what I'm gonna do is add in some slight detail inside these crevices and the reason for that is that if you have a look at the reference photos you can see that wherever there's been a hit or a chip that the the surface underneath is very porous it's this jaggedy bit it's not totally smooth like Alice's so ours right now is sort of looking like this would sort of suit an overwatch character you know like a stylized sort of look but I want to go for photo realism okay so I am gonna be adding in some details so here is how here's how to add some text like you could you know go in here and like just very carefully dot but I mean that's gonna be a nightmare and it's never gonna look very good but if you were to go to the properties go to the texture panel over here what I'm gonna do is with the sculpt brush and abled I'm gonna go underneath texture I'm gonna click new and then over here I'm gonna select that new texture but I've created and then I'm gonna select clouds so here what I can do is if I click on ramp I can change like if it's not like that like basically as I'm drawing like it'll do the clouds but it's sort of like a uniform just it's not very good and also by the way it's tiling so the first thing you want to do is get rid of that tiling effect so I'm gonna change this instead of it being too view plane which is the brush mapping default I'm gonna change it to random which means I believe it's gonna choose a random part of the texture every time it's used across the surface so it doesn't have that awful yeah what I had going on just there for a second the other thing I want to do is yeah enable ramp and now I can choose so now the areas that it actually paints with is a lot more notice of it's not that grayish thing it's giving like severe parts that are down in severe pods which are popping out so yeah and you can see that this is set to add right now so as I draw it's adding to it if I hold down control it's going to be subtracting to it and the subtract is really what's gonna give it a lot of the shape that we want so with this done what I'm gonna do is in here and you remember with the dynamic topo that the closer you get to it the more detail it's gonna add to that area if I'm to draw right here you can see I can very quickly just add in some detail now this this cloud level here you can see that at this level like if you zoom out to here that detail is too fine we don't want the detail to be that fine so I'm gonna undo it and what I'm gonna do there's a couple of ways you could change the scale of it one of them were to just be to use a smaller brush or a larger brush right because that's the actual text you can see the texture underneath it but I don't want to have to use a gigantic brush because then I would have to be able to wake you - you know all the way in to use it instead what I want to do is change the size of it right here so I'm just going to turn that way up to about one and now when I draw with it you can see that it's it's a lot chunkier right I can go down a size if I want it to be a little bit finer now you can sort of see how that's gonna look okay so that looks pretty good so I am going to continue this all the way around so I am I'm subtracting and I'm adding as I as I draw so I'll add a little bit and I'll subtract a little bit and just try and make it look like my reference photo right in here again these reference photos if you want them youtube description there's a little zip file for you there but anyways time lapse time let's finish it [Music] [Music] okay so at this point of of the skull I've noticed that I've sort of run out of detail on some of these areas so I am going to drop that out on top of one more level down to one pixels which is gonna give me double the amount of detail where I where I put the put the put the brush right so yeah again don't go overboard because otherwise it will look funny when you zoom out actually that does kind of look a little bit funny so maybe I'll just turn up this size a little bit but yeah I do want there to be some detail but just not too much detail so it's just getting that blend so zooming out zoom in just make sure that it looks right [Music] [Music] [Music] and there we go we have finished our sculpt we've added in some tiny amounts of noise slash looking detail in the crevices or whatever if you don't have it some does some didn't always making this for a game I might spend a little bit extra time really going in there but this is like the sixth time I've done this today and it looks pretty good honestly so that that's just gonna do it for us guys so if you enjoyed the video give it a thumbs up um in the next video we are gonna be taking that detail and then baking it onto this so that we get the detail from our high poly mesh but the joy of a low poly mesh so that's what we're gonna do in the next video so if you want to watch that click it right there and I will see you there thanks for watching bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 437,768

Rating: 4.970418 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, beginner, sculpting

Id: ywSq0bSYLWI

Length: 37min 28sec (2248 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2017