EASY Info Decals with Decal Machine (Blender)

hey guys in this video i want to show you how you can make really cool sci-fi decals with the decal machine here in blender very straightforward process and we're just going to hop right into it so we're going to make this decal right here so what i want to start with is a simple plane we'll press shift a and add in a plane and i simply want to come in here and merge these top vertices together we'll press m and then merge at center now just to make this a bit more rounded and natural we're going to select everything with a and press ctrl shift b and just scroll up to like 12 segments or something and now we're going to have this nice smooth set of corners here now this is a very generic shape so to make this a bit more visually appealing and sci-fi looking what we can do you could do this by just using a regular boolean or with box cutter you could just come in and add in a line box and we're just going to kind of make a cut in here kind of like like this and now it kind of has a bit more visual appeal to it now i want to apply the boolean right off the bat so let's go ahead and just come in here and apply the boolean and what i want to do as a matter of fact this line looks a bit too wide for me let me try this again i'm very picky with how i set these up let's do something like that yeah it looks good we'll apply the boolean and then what i want to do is take this vertex and press ctrl shift b round that out and then we can round these three out as well ctrl shift b and just make it nice and smooth now what i want to do next is make it just a bit more visual appeal kind of break the monotony of this object or the shape so i'm going to go into the ngon cutter here once again you could just use a regular boolean if you're not using a box cutter and we just kind of come in here and just kind of cut in a shape like that right cool we're going to apply that boolean and then once again we're going to ctrl shift b to bevel those vertices right there and now we have a cool looking sci-fi shape so to spice this up a bit more what i want to do is press shift a and then add in some text now the default text in blender is just kind of not super exciting so you can just download some sci-fi fonts on the internet i'm going to be using this font called expansiva bold so i'm just going to scroll down to here expand siva bold and you're going to see it's like a nice sci-fi text and i'm just going to type in triangle with a capital t make it a bit more professional and we're just going to move it right here so what i want to do is scale this on the y-axis so we'll just kind of scale it that way and just make it whenever you kind of scale these down and squash them they look a bit more sci-fi looking so that's why i'm doing that and i'm also going to reset the origin to the geo and scale it down just a bit more it's a bit too much maybe like right here and then what i want to do is duplicate this and move it down and i'm just going to go in here and type in intergalactic obviously you can make your own names i'm just doing an example here and i want this one to be in the center so i'm going to go ahead and center this maybe not do something like that and i want to make that text just a little bit smaller than the main one so let's turn off the overlays and see how this looks for right now this needs to be scaled down just a bit more i think and this needs to be moved up a bit more not really sure i like how that feels we'll kind of scale both these up maybe there we go much better so this is the easy part the tricky part is turning this into a decal and decal machine so basically you know adding it into your own library so what we're going to do is set up a camera we're just going to press shift a add in a camera and i'm just going to make this a square size we'll do like 20 48 by 2048 and then what we want to do is we want to let's make this an orthographic camera and i'm going to press ctrl alt 0 on the numpad likewise what you could do is you could um go to view align view and then align active camera to view and then if we press g and then zz actually we can't do that in ortho we have to use the orthographic scale i'm gonna kind of move that in and move it up try to get this as centered as possible okay i do want to make this a bit more um kind of rectangular we don't need all the space here so as a matter of fact i'm just going to make this a perspective view and give it like 300 millimeters which is basically orthographic z z to move it out basically the same thing make sure the borders are tight and then what we want to do is perhaps just kind of scale that down a bit something like that will be okay and at this point what i do is i just remove um any hdr i have and i instead just render with a you can use any color you want it really doesn't matter but i'm just going to put mine to white and we're gonna press the f12 key to render this okay here we go this should only take you a few seconds to render it took me like a minute because one the resolution is pretty high you could probably scale this down to be honest and also you don't need a high sample count at all you can use like i don't know 20 it probably something really low like that anyways it should not take you long to render even on a weaker machine so i'm going to go ahead and save this image and i'm just going to save it as a 16 bit tiff here i'll just call this um triangle that's fine and we'll just save that the reason we want to use a six 16-bit tiff is because it's a bit higher quality we're going to save it as a png at the end so now what you want to do is load this into photoshop um affinity photo the list goes on and on and on you can use like the most basic software for this all we're going to do is change the color so you're going to see we have the transparent background here by the way if you don't have the transparent background you should have this turned on under film so that way you actually have a transparent background anyways we're going to go back here into photoshop it should be transparent i'm going to select this with the magic wand tool and we're going to invert the selection with ctrl shift i and what i want to do is change the color to 128 by 128 by 128 so it's like a gray color mid-tones and then i'm going to press alt delete and that's going to make like a grayer color this will give you better results in your decals um at this point we can scale this down i think the resolution is a bit too high so maybe we just like divide it by two or something that's probably fine it's going to be a small decal anyways and now we want to do is go to file save a copy and we're just going to save this as a png and we'll just call this triangle as well go to save and medium file size is fine the next part is really easy all we need to do is um you can open a new blend file that's what i'm going to do as a matter of fact and in this blend file we want to first of all we're going to go to decal machine so we'll go to machine click on this button going to go to info decal and make sure you clear out any images you have here now i want to load in that image so i'm going to go here and load in that png we just saved and i'm going to make the padding like 4 pixels and at this point we can just hop into top view and click on create info decal and then if we go into material preview there it is we have an info decal all set up for us cool so what we want to do is put this into our very own decal library so basically something like this notice how i have my own library of the decals i've been working on really easy to do we have to go to edit preferences and in decal machine you can actually add in your own library by going here you're gonna see like a big list i'm gonna scroll all the way down and under create empty just type in a new name this will add in a folder for you cool and then you should be able to just go in here and choose that folder right you just choose that folder select your decal and then just make a name for your decal so i could just call it triangle and then i could just click add decal to library so it's a super simple process as long as you know the steps you need to take and you can make as many info decals as you want you could you know sell them on gumroad if you wanted to if you are going to do that i'd recommend making a lot and making them really good quality because a lot of people have been making decal packs recently so as a result of that decal video i made months back i really did not expect that many people to start making decal packs so um yeah you're gonna want something to stand out these are just for on our patreon we make decals every month so that's why i'm making these in the first place but yeah that's how you make your own then you can just load them in whenever you want and use them in your scenes pretty cool stuff hope the video helped and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 5,671

Keywords: blender decal machine, blender info decals, blender hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling blender, blender tutorial, blender beginner, hard surface blender, blender hard surface, blender 3d modeling, blender hard ops, blender boxcutter, hard ops, boxcutter, 3d modeling, blender modeling tutorial, blender beginner tutorial, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blender bros, masterxeon1001

Id: _EYB_pEfM_k

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021