Easy Texturing with Stencils | Blender 2.81 | Beginner

hello and welcome to gamut media I'm grant Abbott and today we're going to be painting with stencils it's a really nice easy way of creating realistic objects very simply there's no real artistic skill needed and some people will be delighted to hear you can do it with a mouse you won't see any visible seams there's no complex unwrapping and it's pretty easy to set up it's not highly optimized for games but it will work really well and it will look pretty good so you will be able to use this in games and it will look quite effective and not influence your performance too badly so here's the final scene that I've set up I'm only going to go through how to paint the rocks and the posts in this case I'll save the grass texture for another time let me know in the comments below whether you'd like to see that what do you will need to do before you start is go across two textures comm and grab yourself some nice textures that you can use to paint with so under the woods section for example you can use some nice wooden planks some wood ends and those rocks as well on there and all sorts you do have to login and have an account but you don't have to pay because you get 15 credits free each day and that should be plenty for just testing things out so I will start with a completely new scene and we can start with our basic cubes so let's go in so I'll scale it down in everything but the z-axis so s then shift said to around there let's go to front view with one on my numpad and grab in the third axis so it's above what will be the floor later on so here we've got a simple post it's very low poly it's low poly as it can be but what I like to do is just add a bit of variation to it so into edit mode and ctrl R add two loop cuts so use your wheel scroll up for two loop cuts left click twice to set it and then just rotate really slightly that's just a tiny bit of variation and makes it less uniform so there we go we've got one post let's add a rock so shift a mesh I case fit now this is fairly low poly still so that's fine I'll just move it off to the side so grab in the x-axis and I'll go into sculpt mode so up the top here to sculpt mode down to the grab tool and you can see it's got a dot on the other side of the rock so if I move something around here it's going to do it on the other side that's symmetry so I'll just turn to symmetry off because rocks generally aren't symmetrical so down to symmetry turn that off and let's make the brush nice and big with F you can just use the controls over here if you're not used to the keyboard shortcuts and just squish it around so it's a rock so just randomly pull it about the place don't go overboard there's no need if you want to learn more about sculpting and do check out my sculpting courses on the website which are all completely free ok so that's very basic it doesn't need to be any more complex than that let's go back to layout mode I'll scale this down slightly and just move it into position it can be sitting in the ground slightly so that doesn't matter that it's going into the ground like that so let's start with our rock because that's nice and simple to paint now what we will need to do with both these objects is unwrap them so don't follow along just yet because I'm going to make a mistake here into edit mode select all with a and you to unwrap and I use the smart UV project for this it's nice and simple and you don't really have to think much so smart UV project and I'll turn the island margin up to point zero 6 just so a nice and safe and things won't overlap each other when we paint press ok now interestingly I didn't get an error message which I was expecting but I forgot that it still had uniform size what I mean by this if what I mean by this if I go back to object mode tab and press n on my keyboard and let's go to item you can see that the scale is not set to 1 but it is uniform it is all the same size that's why the unwrap still worked without the error message if I do the same for the post however let's go into the post into edit mode select all you to unwrap smart UV project I'll a margin is set to point zero 6 press ok I haven't got the error message again let's have a look into object mode item that has non-uniform scale so I should have got an error message down here let's have a look at the UV editing workspace now that is incorrect because you can see the top and bottom here of our post is the same size as the sides so usually blender gives us an error message down here saying non-uniform size but for some reason it didn't in this case so do watch out what you will need to do and you can start following along again is in object mode you can select both at the same time if you like with shift control a control a will apply your scale so obviously the scale is what we're choosing now when I choose the objects press n on my keyboard the scale is set to 1 for both of them and that's much more desirable when we're doing things like unwrap now you can just do all your editing of your shape in edit mode and you won't have to worry about these things but often the origin point will move if you're doing that and sometimes you just forget so I'll press n to get rid of that toolbar select my rock again into edit mode select all I've already unwrapped this of course but you'll need to press you to unwrap with everything selected smart UV project and that does the unwrapping for you basically then when I've clicked that I'm in the smart UV project panel you can leave everything the same but do turn the island margin up that's the gap between your islands as these are known as so these are big patches of your rock that have been split up into a 2d area you don't really have to understand that for this to work press okay so you can see the big gaps in my UV editing space that's why it's not particularly optimized for games although it will work and you probably won't notice much performance issues depending on the complexity of your game and the platform that you're on but anyway on to the texture painting now so we've done a round wrap and we're ready for the texture painting panel over here so let's click on that you'll notice it's purple it's always purple by default when there's no texture on it and it tells you that over here on the texture slot area at the top here I do have to have my tools selected here and make sure you are in texture paint mode up here so let's add a texture I'll press the plus sign over here and choose a base color I'll call it rock painted and you don't need the Alpha so we can turn that off it just makes your texture file size bigger so I'll uncheck that and let's actually start with a rock base color somewhere around mid gray press ok now sometimes it appears over here sometimes it doesn't I'm generally finding that it doesn't these days so we can just choose our texture by coming to the top here and choosing the rock painted texture and now we can actually see that great extra that we've made over here now I always like to pull out if I go to where my cursor changes to the crosshairs there pull out a new window by left-clicking and dragging for my shader editor at the top here that way I can see that textures plugged into the color and it just makes me happy I press it end to get rid of this panel this isn't absolutely necessary but I do like to see what's going on with my textures it will help us later on when we're trying to adapt the material as well but don't feel like you have to have that open so let's make sure our texture painting is working I should be able to draw some white onto here that's great I'll undo that and what I want to do is bring my textures in so I'm going to extend this panel out here I best move these across a bit as well to give us some more space and I want to create a new window here as well again you don't have to do this I'm doing it because I think it makes it easier to explain and easier to follow what I want to do is change this one over here to the texture panel which is just the same over here of course because we're going to bring in a texture that we're going to use as a brush you don't need an extra panel down here you can just flick between two here's the tools and here's the texture so I'll go down to my texture option here not the texture mask that's for changing your brush this is for adding a stencil so I'll use the disclosure arrow there and add a new texture now you can see what happens over here in the texture panel and if you want to go there you can change this of course but it adds a new texture for us so we've got a new texture here and this is the actual texture that were editing so we have to go to the texture panel in order to edit that texture I'll bring it across slightly more so we can read the titles so at the moment it's set up to image or movie so you can have all sorts of textures let's choose the magic texture for example and you can see it update in here and now I can paint magic rocks I'll undo that I think because I don't like magic rocks so I'll change this back to image or movie because then we can add our own in down here so I can press open and you can see it changing down there open and find my textures so pretty much any old rocky texture will do I'll go for a different one this time I've got lots in there mainly from textures calm fantastic sight and press ENTER to bring that in and slowly it appears down here and now we can start painting that texture onto our rock which is not looking too bad but I don't particularly like the way it's itself about it's not bad but we've got some more options in our texture panel down here at the moment it's set to tiled in many cases is much easier if we change the mapping method to stencil then when I move my mouse over the viewport I then get a stencil appear to move the stencil I right-click and I can move it around to resize his shift right click and drag and to rotate his control right click and drag now I can use the stencil to paint areas of my rock I'll press full stop on my num pad to zoom into my rock and then it'll be centered around my camera and I can go around painting the rock now at the moment it's a little bit tricky to see what's going on it's much better if we're in Luke death mode so let's click on that and we get the HDR I in the background which will help us with a more realistic look also I'm just going to go to object mode right click on our object and shade smooth that's what it will end up looking like in the end so back to texture paint mode and the stencil will reappear I'll zoom in a bit and start painting and if I move away then I can see without the stencil so I just move to another viewport then I can then paint in move away and see what it looks like and that's about the right resolution maybe it needs to be a tiny bit closer in perhaps around here that's probably a bit better now what you'll notice if I move around is stretching can you see the stretching at the top there so when you're painting be careful not to go to the edges like this because if I move around there now you can see that stretching so try and stick to the middle move stick to the middle move stick to the middle now I'll just quickly turn my texture off if you ever need to remove the texture you just press the cross sign there it is still there if I click on it you can still get it back but there's no texture so there's no stencil anymore and there is a bit of overlap so what we might want to do is fill our whole object in and then come up to the strength and just lower it slightly so I'll bring my stencil back by clicking on here bring my stencil back and start painting and that way it will blend into each other a little bit better so I can go all the way around my rock always sticking to the middle don't go to the edges so watch out for that stretching it's also worth saying that you can actually change the color of these as well so my image is very sort of gray but I can give it a blue texture there if I want to I don't really want to do that though in this case so it's always best to keep it completely white and then you know it's going to exactly look like this okay so if I close my stencil down for a moment you can then see my finished rock so it's quite flat at the moment in terms of it's not got much shading obviously you can put lights in your scene to effect that but you can add your own sort of ambient occlusion depending on how you want your textures to work in your game or your scene because this is not a true PBR as you can see we've only got the image texture we've got no normals or bump or roughness I'll talk a bit about that in a moment though it is a very basic texture so you might want to put some artistic elements to it so we could change this to the multiply bring our color down a bit and give it a bit of shading on the bottom I think a little less strength there would help though that way it will look like it's sitting on the ground more and the lights hitting the top of it you can as well change the roughness the shinier you go the more you'll want to actually use the texture for the shininess so it's fairly rough rocked this one and there's a specular down I prefer usually so that's the basic use of the painting let's now go across the shading tab and set up a material a bit so across to the shading and we've got our shader editor at the bottom here let's move into our rock a bit more now what you can do is use the image texture as a bump so if I press shift a now I can go to vector and bump this is not the most efficient way of doing this it would be better to take this into a program like materialised which i have a tutorial on now put a link in the description because then you can get proper normal maps which look a lot better and in fact bumps don't work particularly well in Eevee but they will work a bit so let's plug the color into the height not the normal into the height and then the normal into the normal so it's taking the black and white information from this and turning it all bumpy as you can see and that looks pretty horrendous but we can just turn the strength down to something like point one just to give it a tiny bit of a bump that way the light won't glare off it as much and it won't be so smooth but we can still have a bit of roughness involved so if I mute this now you can see the effect of it very subtle you may not even be able to see it on the screen that well you can always turn this up slightly you think that's not be enough for you but be a bit careful with this it's a can look very fake you can also use the image for the roughness as well so if we were to plug this straight into the roughness now you can see it gets a lot of sort of glossiness and looks very plasticky and we can see the bump a lot more so I might turn it down now I see two point one still looking very smooth so shift a to add a converter and a color ramp then you can put that in the middle of the two I just move these other way and then move into your color ramp and remember anything that's white will be rough anything that's black will be shiny so if I bring up the black it should make it more shiny which it is it's looking a bit weird now so let's bring down the blacks we don't really want it shiny at all unless it was raining so let's change the black to a gray so less black there and it should make it less shiny so bringing it down towards the white somewhere around there still looking a bit shiny but then we can bring that white across as well and then it's got some shine in places if you want it so you can mess around with the strength here and make it lumpy and bumpy and mess around with the roughness here and make it much more rough or less shiny by adding more white into your color ramp okay so we've got a basic Rock there now try and do the same thing for yourself with the beam before I go through things you'll need to select the beam if it hasn't already then unwrap it in the UV editing workspace then go into the texture workspace and add to your textures okay so you can follow along if you're struggling into the UV editing workspace let's select our object remember I've reset the scale so it's all at one if you need to do that again into object mode and control a scale now I can unwrap smart UV project with an island margin of about point zero six of a nice and safe and press ok can you see how different the unwrap was that's how much difference the scale can make so now that it's nicely unwrapped we can go across to the texture painting workspace now this already has so it's white but it doesn't have a texture so there's no texture in here for us to paint on and you can see because I've got the shader editor open that there's no texture attached when I press the plus sign add a base color and call it post paint make sure you've not got an alpha on and change it to a color that you're likely to use or be similar to your main color and press ok there you can see that texture slot was made and we've got a brown texture on our wood so I'm still on multiply so be aware of that make sure your brush is on mix and turn it all the way to one and all the way to white then you know exactly what you have in your texture will appear when you paint scroll down we've got our texture there already which is a rock but I'm going to add a new one and it goes black of course and then we've got our texture over here so that remember is under the texture panel which you can get to here if you haven't got an extra window so I'll press open find my wood texture this one looks good and press ok now it's still on stencil so when I bring my mouse across the stencil is there now this is slightly different it's put it into a square but the texture itself was a long oblong so I need to press image aspect and that will retain the image aspect ratio come back into my scene after pressing that and you can see it's working this time we need to rotate our texture so I can set this to 90 degrees the angle down here it's a nice easy way or you can press ctrl right click to rotate I'll set it back to 90 degrees full stop on my num pad to zoom into my object and shift right click to resize my texture let's just quickly paint it on so I like to just plonk it on to start with and then start thinking about exactly how I wanted to sit so now I'll resize my brush and I'll go away from the edges so there's no stretching down each side and I can be a bit more precise now try not to min and out too much because the size of your texture will change on your object and when you're doing the more detailed work you might want to turn the strengths down so you can see it's nicely getting rid of my seams and that's looking for now what you might want to use is a different texture for the top I'm just going to be lazy for time sake but you can just add a new texture in it and find a would end texture up the top here but I'm going to be a bit naughty and just do a messy job so remember right click to move your texture control right click to rotate and shift right click to scale okay now what I did forget to say was you must save your textures so across to the image and make sure you save if your wooden texture is not appearing then press the little down arrow there and find your post to paint just there ok so I'll turn the texture off by crossing it up there and have a quick look make sure it's ok it's alright but I think we need to go into object mode and right click shade smooth and we've got this really nasty gallery' shine to it so let's turn the roughness up just for now and that's a lot better isn't it and that's quite a nice wooden post we can use the same process for trying to give it a bit of bump and things so let's go across the shading so you matches the touch shift a vector bump from the color into the height and from the normal into the normal and we need to turn the strength right down I'll get to point one and see how that looks and that's looking fine like I say you can't really use a lot of detail here because you can see that bump is not particularly nice-looking but somewhere around point one is good enough to break up that glare and shine the specular is the amount of shine you get and the roughness is how shiny your object is a little bit confusing that you can of course use the color ramp again into the roughness if you want I don't find we need it so much for the wood so there we go a simple way of creating a rock and a wooden post and you can use this technique for all sorts of things just by painting it on with stencils you can then use materialise to make your PBR textures or just set them up nice and simply here and it gives some pretty good results if you want to know more about adding the grass then do comment below and I'll add that in and if you've got any questions comment below and I'll do my best to help do always read the comments because usually the questions already answered for you so thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 173,714

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting

Id: lO8qDNZf5o0

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019