Faster Sculpting with Blender's Sculpt Toolkit Addon - CGC Live Event

hello everybody welcome to the CG cookie livestream blender Tuesday it's good to see you all again this is the first blender stream since the class ended last week and I mean that was a blast thank you for those of you who have given feedback I really do appreciate it very helpful to hear how how you guys thought the class went and improvements possible improvement stuff like that so thank you it's good to see you again with the month of August we are doing this theme about add-ons and like exploring I mean I call them showcase and I'm starting to favor the word exploration blender add-on exploration because you know we want this to be like an objective look at tools we're not trying to sell you on anything we're not you know it's not endorsed by you know like the add-on creator or anything we're just trying to take a good objective look at tools how they can improve workflows or certain tasks within blender so that's what we're gonna be looking at this month and let's see so anything else I wanted to say before we get started always blank in the in the chat when I only talked about random stuff I always enjoy those conversations but inevitably when I go live it's like oh yeah what am I doing here what is this all for then I say July oh I'm sorry you're right I'm very sorry it's the month of July that we're gonna be looking at add-ons I'm sorry I I get my time is messed up but yeah welcome so today we're gonna be talking about the sculpt tool kit it's an add-on at the blender market that you can get it's $15 and the reason we're gonna be looking at it is twofold number one is I'm a big fan of sculpting if you've been around CG cookie much at all or if you follow me on Twitter or anything if you're familiar with my work I do a lot of sculpting it's my preferred method for creating in 3d especially models and organic models even hard surface I like to try and dabble in that realm and I just love sculpting it's so much more intuitive it's easier to pick up it's less geometric and limiting but you've all heard this from me before so it's no it's nothing new I love sculpting and I know that a lot of people do and so when you spend a lot of time sculpting in blender even though it's a very competent program tomorrow you're asking didn't the livestream start August last year oh yeah yeah you're right so it's I think well isn't it Jill maybe it was August I think we launched the website 6.0 at the big at the end of July which would mean we we that's when we committed to doing live streams to testing if these were interesting to people interesting to our members and so we must have started in July I'm sorry in August very beginning of August good grief these months but yeah so we're coming up on our like year anniversary of of live streams that's pretty cool but yeah so when you're spending a lot of time sculpting even though blender is a very competent program a lot of features that work very well right out of the box the more time you spend sculpting you know there are efficiencies that can be had and there's several people who have written tools to make the sculpting experience a little more fully featured or a little more streamlined and a scoped toolkit is one of those and that's what we're gonna be looking at today and then the second reason is I featured a similar add-on called sculpt tool sculpt tools you I believe and I use that in one of our courses and I'm gonna get to that but I'm basically that one's outdated it's not developed anymore and so sculpt tool kit I see as a replacement I've been looking for like a good replacement and this is this is one of them and so yeah that's those are the reasons why I wanted to specifically focus on sculpt tool kit and it is by on the blender market he refers to himself as flow tools but his real name according to the add-on installation is Jean de Costa Machado I think I'm getting fairly close but so yeah what the sculpt toolkit is its efficiency tools for streamlining a blender sculptors workflow so if you're in sculpting you use blender it's definitely something to consider and um so there are several tools that have been aimed at this this type of functionality for a while ever since really my first memory of them is when the blanking did dynamic topology when that came along and it revolutionized the way you could sculpt in blender but also kind of blender was one of the first to feature a kind of unlimited self generating model format for sculpting and so it changed a lot about the the sculpting game and so when that came out we started to see tools come out and so aside from scope toolkit there is flow tools which is actually the precursor to sculpt tool kit and it is developed by the same person I believe it was the the beta of sculpt tool kit so this was like what he used to get user feedback to develop the add-on into something and into its final product which which is sculpt tool kit so this is free and if we look it up let's see it's still available flow tools - blender so yeah there is a blender nation article about it and I do remember seeing this but I don't think I looked into it at the time but yeah so you can download this add-on and it's very similar it's not as many features as a sculpt tool kit but if you want to test it and see kind of get a taste of what the add-ons like before you commit to purchasing it this is a good option but you can see like the development has stopped you know like four months ago maybe a little thing three months ago but on the blender market it was released three months ago so it's safe to say that you know this is going to be the final product that will continue to get development so there's flow tools and then there is speed sculpt which is another really good add-on it was it was kind of between sculpt tool kit and speed sculpt for me um and speed sculpt is on Gumroad for 1175 if we go let's see I think this is here yeah so um the I recognized this user name Pitt - wazoo he does really good he or she does really good sculpts and I follow them on Twitter so it was kind of cool to see them come up with a very fully featured add-on it's actually got a I would say significantly more tools then sculpt toolkit and in that way what my final decision was kind of sculpt tool kit was a little more simple and directly related in my opinion more to sculpt tools UI which I promoted to people you know members like you who watched our stuff on CD cookie and that course that I specifically taught so that's why I am looking at sculpt toolkit but if there's interest you know maybe I could do a second one I don't actually have a live stream scheduled for next week I just got to figure it out I haven't decided on an add-on but maybe I'll do this one and do sort of a comparison you know if you want to see more sculpt efficiency tools on that note if you want if you have any recommendations we are going to do later in the month we're gonna do decal machine mesh machine hard ops like those big big ones but if you got any other suggestions I'm open and I could do it next week but anyway maybe at the end of if I remember at the end of this stream I'll ask for a vote if you want me to look at speed sculpt or if you want me to do a different add-on so yeah there's speed sculpt another great option similar price but um absolutely worth supporting these devs I mean yeah the you just it's it's a very good thing so and then their sculpt tools UI which you all are probably familiar with if you've been around cg cookie and seen seen a few my sculpting courses but it's kind of infamous at this point if we go look at at the core so this is modeling a sci-fi helmet and I use the add-on extensively and we've got so many questions about I think I found out a problem with the grease cut it doesn't appear that the subtract mode works on the sculpt a Don no longer in blender grease cut not working there's been a bunch of confusion because the add-on has not been developed and you can find that add-on by the way if you let's see that's flow tool where what let me look it up yeah so it's still available on on github and you can install it if you want but the problem is it's not been developed for let's see five years ago it looks like maybe three years something was tough so it's not been developed for a long time and with each new blender version it just gets further and further obsolete so it's kind of time to maybe let that one go but it was great in its time and it it it opened my eyes to how useful some of these key tools are for a sculptors workflow also typical announcement like please if you have a question feel free to ask is the best time to ask questions and get an answered but add a prefix question and all caps just to ensure that I see them a little more obviously and I don't want to miss your questions but checking it out what about Pro lighting studio yeah Andrew prices add-on about lighting that would be a would be a pretty good one yeah thank you for for suggesting that one again if anyone else has any suggestions for add-ons let me know question do you use sculpt tool kit or something like that for your personal work I do use sculpt tool kit I bought it and in my I've not used it for any training yet but I've used it for my my personal workflow and and you know it is since I committed to the sculpt tools UI like I've already that's kind of a mixed bag to wear like I liked expanding into showing and teaching like there are tools out there that can significantly improve your workflow but the catch the catch to that is is you kind of depend on the add-on being updated by by the developer or your you know training kind of becomes obsolete so I don't know I will probably teach sculpt toolkit but since it costs money you know I must also I'm conflicted about that so but I do use it for my personal work it is a very good tool set and will demo I'll explore it today and show you you know some of how I use it but um yeah okay so some of the the key factors and features in these add-ons that deal with sculpting and improving sculpting workflow is boolean tools which which sculpt tool kit has all of these but we'll just brief we touch on them so boolean tools are great for like the kit bashing process which should be a familiar workflow if you've heard if you've heard that that workflow from from the course you know like bashing the sci-fi helmet being able to like take a bunch of shapes and crash them into each other and subtract and add and intersect and all those boolean functionalities it can make for a liberating creative experience and so that is really important for a sculptors advance tool set and and we've got them here in addition we've got this thing called slash cutting which is basically like grease cut you know it's the ability to take your grease pencil marks and use them to subtract from your mesh so you can very intuitively draw lines cut them away from from your sculpt object and very very useful I would say that this is actually maybe a little more fully featured than sculpt tools UI we've got draw slash well we'll go into those you've got several different modes so it's it's a yeah it's kind of like baseline you know you need to have boolean tools to have a sculpt add-on and then we've also got mask tools which is which is pretty great he this is the only add-on that I've seen that I have personally seen be able to like mask and have like and you can like extract not extract but you can specifically decimate within that masked area now there's the the speed sculpt does it I think as like a the only thing I've seen speeds don't do is that it's like a very harsh mask whereas this one can actually do the the interpolation like the the blend out and it will subdivide it will decimate accordingly so that's pretty cool but maybe that's a small thing and maybe that's not fully true of the other add-on I haven't actually bought it and used it yet just watch the hour-long video on it and so anyway the mask tools um really really nice additional feature then then what sculpt tools you I had but these are great and and then this one is is as far as I know the only add-on that this envelope building where you take your envelope rig you know how you can change to be bone or to octahedral or envelope bones well he this developer has been able to take those bones that skeleton and convert it to a mesh and it's wild it's a it's kind of like the skin modifier on steroids a little bit it's just a you know you can be in my yeah in my opinion you can be my experience you can be more customizable with with with the envelope builder so this is an awesome feature that's unique as far as I can tell so we're gonna take a look at that and those are the three big ones there are other features that we're gonna look at but but these are the big ones in the add-on and so with that said about ready to jump into Oh high stools is very good to actually I oh nice tools as well I preferred ice tools the reason I bought as I preferred it over hard opps actually about hard ups too but ice tools I thought was a little more intuitive and not not kind of I don't have hard ups to me when I've used it has been a sleeper learning curve ice tools a little less so but but we're gonna let lamp L do hard ops and show us that I'm kinda hoping that he is gonna be able to like crack that nut even for me so let's see here from Cody do you do any of the tools allow you to symmetrize a portion of a mesh and not the rest no that is one thing that is missing and and along the process I do have some things that I don't love about the add-on and maybe if the developer watches this you know it could be kind of like a feature request in a way but and there are no symmetry tools yet with this add-on I would love for there to be I know speed sculpt does have some some symmetry tools so that is nice to have for sure but yeah I'm with you it would be nice to be able to like mask off the face and symmetrize it but similar but not symmetrize anything else that would be awesome but to my knowledge I don't I don't know speed scope has a very rudimentary version of envelope bones that said if I compare the two early on I would have gone with skull toolkit now yeah speed scope has a like a ton of tools that when I watched the video I was like this is amazing but it's almost too much like I I would have to commit more to learning that one but that's not a negative thing I just got to kind of have my foot in I don't want to get my workflow ever to too dependent on a different tool that's not stock in blender that's kind of just the teachers curse is what I feel like but yeah definitely check out speed sculpt it looks really really good anybody heard of zero brush from blender since a I haven't I've heard of it flick it up what is zero brush paint and sculpt instantly ha in my searching I didn't run across this and I think I've heard of it but not yeah not not sitting out use it myself not even really seen much about it oh but olive blender is changed interesting uh email reminder should be sent like 30 minutes before the stream I frankly forgot about that feature what what is the length of time it sends the email oh it only sends the email right away it doesn't it I'm sorry about that yeah that's something we should change to we're actually in the middle of an edu sprint so I should make it I'm gonna make a note of that you know to change it cuz that does stink I guess people are showing up late cool alright so with that said let's jump into blender let's give this thing a test drive so to speak so alright so installing the add-on you guys should probably all know how to do this by now but just for the sake of it let's um let's see I'm gonna remove I have it installed but I'm gonna remove it I'm gonna remove all the sculpt tools UI while I'm at it and so I download the file you know once you get a dot zip you can install that dot zip and we'll go to my downloads sort by date it's one of my newer ones blender sculpt tools mess no that's not it sculpt tool kit this one alright so that's pretty simple you know most people know how to install add-ons but there you go so you've got it installed and I'm gonna save the user settings so it stays enabled once I restart blender and here it appears down here in the toolbar and there like I said there are other features that I have not gone over I did not tease at the beginning and at the top we have drawing options and so these are like repeat tools that we have elsewhere but since they're here I think the intent the developer is that we can maximize our viewport Haydar in in panel view properties and just be able to sculpt with very little UI real estate taken up I believe that would be the intention and so you can you know turn off the grid floor if you want you can change your lens on your camera which typically I like to change that to 60 you can toggle the wire you know which is nice and random colors now this is this nice but it does bring me into the fact that the 2.8 release is imminent it's coming in the next few months as far as we can tell it seems very certain that that's gonna happen and we have a random color feature that will make this obsolete in a way so we're in this awkward pure awkward time to where I'm showing you how to use this add-on but pretty much all add-ons will need to be updated for 2.8 and so hoping that I mean since this is a commercial add-on there is more incentive to update the add-on and so hopefully that will happen but well you know I guess I should say that that with 2.8 coming be aware that like the add-on won't be in immediately ready unless the developer does that so yeah we've got some some nice drawing options that allows us to hide other portions of the UI so that's an that's a very convenient set of tools with that too at the bottom we have solid lights and this is a direct duplication of in your system preferences you have access to these opengl lights and this has a nice set of pre of pre-made what do you call them presets so you can well this isn't really a good model let's add a mesh monkey so like what's nice about this is it's kind of like a primitive not primitive but it's almost like a mat cap system so like with these presets we can we can look at the different styles you know and they have names red clay brown clay and stuff like that and you can create your own so that's really nice and I'm wondering how this will work with 2.82 because one of my annoyances so far with 2.8 is that I don't have access to this stuff anymore it seems or at least it doesn't I do have access to it but it doesn't affect properly there's like a light source within 2.8 that always casts shadows and changes the shading but I can't find like how to control that that mystery light source so that being said like I don't know I'm just not sure how this will work at 2.8 but for 2.7 it's nice to have this I like this in addition to the matte caps so you can change it the blend of default or your current default whatever you have setup which for me is this headlights thing so anyway that's another display feature I don't keep it open too often but um with that said we can look at boolean tools specifically I am loving a 2.8 viewport for sculpting big improvement over 2.7 9 I haven't done a ton of sculpting with 2.8 yet but uh that's good to hear that's really good to hear I know I'm even though my first experience if you guys follow me on Twitter my first experience my first like few hours of seriously trying to work with 2.8 was a little more jarring than I expected I am still very hyped for it and intend on having a great attitude a professional attitude of like let's get on the bandwagon you know let's put the faith in the developers and whichever direction they go so yeah I'm still very hyped and glad to hear of improvements like that anything else question from one to ten if one is total programming nude and noob and ten is a zero cool hacker where do you think you have to be to develop an add-on for blender um interesting question so I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle in that I have created a toolset that when I worked at the studio before I joined CG cookie I found myself doing the same stuff a lot of times like just pipeline things and and so like I decided to like start learning some programming I wanted to see if I can make an add-on and I made a pretty extensive one that had a lot of custom tools that exactly what I needed a lot of macros but then a lot of I mean in a way I guess most of it was macros and so I that myself and I'm not a programmer the most program about programming I've ever done besides that was like coding my personal website from HTML and CSS which you know a lot of fourteen-year-old kids do so that being said you don't have to be like a mastermind I don't think to create stuff like this where I get confused is like how you know initially how this like draw slash option if we click that draw slash how this like converts the grease pencil into look at that I think that's literally the first time I've ever seen it not work maybe it's because they this is separate geometry anyway like how they managed to turn the grease cut into into like a boolean object I don't really know but but somehow they do it and and it's very achievable I guess is what I'm trying to circle back around to if I can do it if I can not like do a significant add-on then you could too so if you're interested in learning definitely explore it because even if you don't make add-ons you can do simple macros that will save you a lot of time and the way I look at it is kind of once you learn to program the computer is your tool you're not just using the how do I say this kindly basically I thought I was at the mercy of the computer before I learned how to program and now that I know how to program a little bit the computer is more at my mercy in a way does that make sense like a shift of power kind of thing anyway definitely explore it if you're interested all right so let's get let me get back on track question what are macros so macros are like okay I'm an example of a macro is the boolean tools so if I add what's get rid of the Suzanne head let's add a cube and then add a sphere all right so a boolean these boolean tools are examples of a macro to where if I click the subtract button here it's at a click of a button it takes the negative space of one object and subtracts that from the other object but if I were to do this with standard blender with stock blender I would have to click this object add a modifier boolean and then select within that modifier this other sphere all right and so it does an operation but it's not the correct operation then I have to switch to difference all right and then maybe hide this object and now we have that result so all of those clicks can be automated into a single button and that is a macro and these these bullying's are perfect examples of that and so it's very very intuitive and just intuitive and user-friendly efficient to be able to two boolean steps together like this right do an intersection you know all these tools I mean bullying's are not new so none of this should be new to you but yeah do you kind of like the Venn diagram space is how I think of it and yeah so boolean z' they're pretty standard they work really well you get what I do like about this one that sculpt tools you I did not do is that hurry I don't think it did is you can choose the solver right here from from the menu so I can be mash is kind of the standard but carve in my experience is a little more robust but maybe can take a little bit longer and so being able to switch that there is is really nice in my opinion I like that option now as far as so the grease cut well no it's not called grease cut the slash cutting is yeah that would be kind of cool kill zone it'll be cool blender had an option like Photoshop to record macros that's very true that would be someone here maybe omar since you're asking you should create an add-on that can record your macros if there isn't already something like that so yeah standard bullying's now the carve the slash cutting so this is is like grease cut if you use sculpt tools UI and similar to the default version of sculpt tools UI is that it simply separates the the the cut the cut piece away and so if you were like in the sci-fi helmet course but I did a lot was like cut from here and then cut again over here you know make a bunch of cuts quickly and something that is kind of annoying it was I thought it was annoying with sculpt tools UI and I think the same thing here is that we don't have an option to automatically remove what you cut away so like I wish that I could just hit draw slash cut and then this piece is gone like the smaller piece is gone I know some add-ons do it by like the direction of the cut so if I make a cut like this like it knows the direction and automatically chooses one side of that direction the specific side of that direction but anyway if the developer ever watches this that'd be that'd be a nice addition so within that though that was kind of the typical drawing draw slash using the grease pencil but you can also do a line slash which I like for being just straight lines that's nice you can also and then another thing like when I make a cut another improvement is when we make a cut let's see we make a line cut I have to go back and select that object like that action can just be can be a little bit sped up if we did the subtract that would be nice let's see what else so the polygon slash tool these are just different types of drawing where you can click and make you know jagged shape if you desired so that's nice and then the mesh cutter I don't I haven't let me see cut the mesh by drawing strokes that's not what it's for let's see let's look I can't let me see I'm not sure what the difference between that and a boolean is 'la but let me I mean look at the documentation I know I've looked this up but I've forgotten the mesh cutter cuts the selected mesh using the active object as a knife oh okay okay that makes sense so let's start over with a new object UV sphere and then we'll use a cube alright so what this will do using the active object mesh cutter is it it's a boolean but it it like maintains the intersected point so it's not really it's like a combination of subtract and intersect in the way so like that's that can be that can certainly be useful yeah it's kind of cool let's see the helmet series it was able to remove the cut by enabling the feature but it doesn't work anymore yeah so I actually added that feature myself because when I was using it I thought it it was easy enough to just add the lines of code in um I haven't done that for this add-on but uh but yeah that was nice and it stopped working because you know it seemed like a simple fix but then I wasn't didn't think I was like committing to like maintaining the add-on but it just became a mess but yeah I would love to have that feature added question do you press ENTER to finalize the cut great question and yes you do and that is a bit of another it's quirky so if I if I choose draw slash I do have to hit enter and it would be nice if we didn't have to but also you can hit escape and that will make your cut it should yeah so I hit escape or if you do anything else it seems straw a line cut here and like click anywhere else on the UI it'll make your cut so with that being known you know it's kind of odd it's just I mean we can maybe eliminate that stage because I'm trying to think like would you ever draw multiple no you can't draw multiple so like I don't really know why it is that way but that that's a little bit cumbersome another small note that I would I would pass to the developer but um yeah I've never really seen an add-on that that needs confirmation but it gets that confirmation whether you hit Enter whether you hit escape whether you click somewhere else in the UI ok escape doesn't work I thought it did but escape apparently does not it doesn't cancel the tool either but like if I click on solid light it'll have to have that selected if I click on the solid lights menu it'll make the cut so that's a little bit I've never seen an add-on do that mildly annoying at this point but okay so that's boolean tools overall a very thorough set of tools using the grease pencil and using just boolean so I like I like what how this is organized I like the functionality there let's move on to the mask tools which let me actually first let's look at the remesh because this is a perfect candidate something that's been boolean is a perfect candidate to be rematched and if we add let's see what do we look what are we looking at here rematch just a regular decimate so this is nice you don't have to set it up yourself but you can in one click let's go point one and then decimate very good I like that macro type approach to the decimation we can also do a simple remesh which uses this acht tree depth of four so if we undo and choose 6:09 decimate simple remesh so that will you know increase the the higher the octree depth obviously the more geometry being used but now we have a very even topology that we can continue sculpting and that would make total sense to rematch these objects if you learned more if you learned to code at least you get to dress like Nia while coding not a bad idea you you certainly get to feel like neo and that's that's actually great I'm not even exaggerating like when he sees the green and like the green code and he's like I can do whatever I want in here that's absolutely what it feels like that is funny you bring that up question if you have experience with bull tools would you use that over the other I have used bull tools I've used a lot of add-ons and sometimes they blend together but bull tools I suppose I only use only I feel like I only use boolean x' in like a sculpting kit bosch context now I know that that the hard surface approach made popular by like hard Ops is that it like it uses boolean intended for rendering whereas I tend to look at bullying's as like roughing in geometry so I know that people do use boolean outside of sculpting plenty especially in this this kind of new era of hard surface modeling like hard ops but since I use it more in sculpting I like that it's packaged inside of of a sculpt add-on so I prefer that personally but I have used bull tools and it's it's good like it's it's not bad at all it's not bad it's actually a very good tool and I think isn't bull tool like incorporated into hard ops I think hard Ops sources other add-ons and like to make the full package but that's a good endorsement there question if you oh you already asked that all right I already answered that all right cool so yeah we're talking about rematching you can do the simple remesh or you can do an advanced tree mesh which I don't really it's got some interest it's got some a lot of settings in here that I don't really know how they work change the iterations let's just do a quick test let's do the iterations down to one let's undo first and see what advanced rematching does let's do it erases down to one let's see I wonder if it how do I tell if there's any difference hmm anyway I think I remember the previous version of this add-on he updated it recently but it was only advanced remesh so every time you clicked on remesh you had to go over these settings and I just remember thinking like I don't know what these settings do like how is a multi-resolution being used in here I don't know but I can't really see any difference so that said in my I tend to just use the simple remash you know can't make an octree depth just go with it simple enough but if you know there is an advanced option all right so those are your remesh tools now rematching makes a lot of sense when you first boolean objects but then there's also so once you have a good geometry that's what I wanted to do I wanted to remesh the object so that I could show you in sculpt mode I could have more geometry for masking okay so we've got this mask option let's turn off symmetry so like you know you can mask your object pretty typical this isn't sculpt tools UI and you can extract that mask ooh but what's cool is as soon as you extract the mask when you move your cursor up and down your mouse up and down that establishes the thickness it's very interactive and it's pretty it's pretty cool and then you click and do it again and that increases the smoothness which I love that I love that interactivity it's really really nice let's do that again but I got to jump back in to sculpt mode to have a little bit more streamlined in the the mode switching that would be nice though it maybe makes sense when I extract a mesh I want to go to object mode into that new mesh but like it would also be cool that just goes straight to sculpt mode in that new mesh but anyway we'll do that again so we'll make another mask whoops not I don't want to play an animation alt m and then so on the side here you know like we can mask off an area all right and then extract the mask move down for the thickness if you move up again to smooth it out you've got this you know really nice I mean this is a great example but but like I see a lot of potential for needing to use this in in sculpting like eyebrows on a character or you know like leather accents on on a characters like clothing you know this has a lot of use and I love the interactivity of of clicking dragging twice that that eyes want to it one more time because I think it's awesome mask extract the mask get your thickness and then get your smoothness love that the only negative about it in my opinion is that it's always on top of the mesh sometimes there is a good use for having for making the solidify modifier be inside the mesh as well so that's the only caveat in my opinion if this could improve it would be the option to move in or out of the object not just a standard default let's see so yeah that's the extract option what else do we got I always have to be in sculpt mode and with a mask or need to be in sculpt mode for these buttons to light up so the mask split this is kind of nice sculpt tools you I did not have this as far as I remember so we can split it and it essentially that's interesting so it kind of acts like a boolean it takes the surface and cuts like a plane as much of a plane through it as it can be and then you can just pull it away so that's that's interesting like if I am let's see if let's see where that could be used a little differently so I can see this being useful for like a character if you wanted to like cut off the forearm you can mask that area off and then just rip it away so mask split yeah that's pretty cool actually May this isn't a great example but let's see I'll blow your mind real quick and then I'll tease you so we're just gonna do this real quick so like if I had a character like this we're gonna go over this this part is awesome and I wanted to lop off the hand to be sculpted separately I mean you know it actually would be probably faster just to use the bullet the draw slash so that would possibly be quicker but and it didn't work I promise you in all of my testing I had no issues I never saw draw slash not work and then it's it's failed a few times why is it failing interesting the problem is that I will never be able to remember all the options you will if you if you find yourself sculpting a lot right I think I almost froze blender what is going on for some reason that's not working well I wasn't I was supposed to be showing you the mask tools anyway so let's try the masking way yeah the whole point of this was to say that you could mask off an area like this mask split okay and then that would be a clean way to cut off the hand so for some reason draw the the slash cutting was not working interesting my blender does seem a little slow with OBS going on so that's kind of typical my computer is getting a little old question why does it blend or just incorporate all those functions by default instead of being separate and enabled as an add-on well I think partly because the ball the beauty of blender is that the community contributes they're their own add-ons to they expand blender using their own programming and then that takes some of the weight off of the blender Institute or the blender animation studio official blender devs to do this kind of functionality because if they were required to like there that's a there the resources aren't there so the beauty is the community is to develop this stuff and if the add-on has a good enough reputation and it's good enough often they get incorporated into trunk just like the node Wrangler add-on right so this started from the node Wrangler who did this one Greg's all bar texture oppa Sebastien Koenig Kristian Brinkman these people made it separate from blender like the separate from the blender devs but it has since been incorporated directly into the blender so the blender into blenders trunk add-ons and so if scope tools or any of these you know stand out and get that kind of reputation and the developer is willing to incorporate it that's this could one day be incorporated directly into blender that was a long way of answering that question but also like this the developer needs you know this is part of the way he's making income is by selling the add-on and so I don't know how that works it will he give that income up in order to serve the community I don't know that's up to them but so a lot of tools in blender have come from add-ons as far as I know and then eventually incorporated directly into blender you're an object mode need to be in edit mode oh you're asking about the grease the grease cut the draw slash I don't think so I should it should work fine yeah I should work completely fine in object mode strange I wonder if I go to sculpt mode that is so bizarre enabling all add-ons can also be heavy wood curious what you mean like if I have a bunch of add-ons loaded I think this is the only add-on I have loaded it's called toolkit but I don't know why that's not working I'm curious now I want to be able to fix it wonder if this closed ends is something or is it carve we have options here so we can test maybe if I switch it from carve to be Oh well that one worked it just took a long time maybe there's a maybe the the mesh is pretty dense I don't know that's it doesn't seem like it should be unusable what if we go to be mesh turn on closed ends huh that is slow and/or not working try another match yeah I should yeah I'm struck because I don't I mean in my testing I've not seen this happen at all strange is there an add-on you just can't live without honestly it's a sculpting add-on it was sculpt tools UI in my personal workflow and I even carry that over into my training but yeah since I sculpt so much that just busted alright let's get rid of that so the add-ons that I do end up unable to live without are the sculpting add-on and sculpt toolkit is becoming that for me but also note wrangler that one is an essential one for working in the node editor and outside of those two okay like loop tools that's one that i use as well let's go back to like a UV sphere make sure that this still works yeah like lightning fast i don't know what it is about that mesh may be too dense but it's also questionable why it's not working but so within if we go to edit mode loop tools is something that I always have enabled I use some of those tools very frequently and then also in my personal workflow I do have my own add-on that I mentioned earlier that I wrote it's got a lot of tools that I just find myself using a lot so those are the three that three for add-ons that I use all the time but I really do try not to be too dependent on add-ons for for instructors sake I'd I feel bad when someone is like hey where did you get that tool and I don't know how to explain them how to do it and like normal blenders try not to be too dependent on it did you test during recording I did not I did not maybe I need to start doing that because in in one of the class streams I you know like it was much slower when I was actually streaming so if that is maybe a problem I need to test I need to come new computer guys that's the that's the real point that I want to land at I need a new computer that will make all things better question is is there an add-on you can't live without all right so we kind of got sidetracked I was talking about yeah the fact that these weren't working it was pretty odd but we were talking about masks our masks options and oh yeah masks deform that's a cool one let's go back to adding another envelope human convert to mesh let's just use resolution 250 okay so what is kind of cool about this masks deform option is it reminds me of ZBrush I think it was meant to be it is meant to be like a a imitation of the way ZBrush works so if I if I want to pose this arm so to speak and I want to let's see is that I forgot how to lasso mask shift control left Mouse all right so we want to mask off this arm if I invert it so only the arm is unmasked and then I add a mask deform I get this little widget which is pretty cool if I move it where I want the pivot to be so this circular one is like moving the origin and then this manipulator is like is the rotation and you can see that we rotate based on the mask all right so I'm getting a really steep fall off really harsh fall off so let's try it again I think well I just deleted them but you can let me undo that let's just click the object and remove masks deform let's try that again sculpt mode and let's say I want to blur out this this mask and so I'm trying to go to the mask tool the mask brush and then gradually subtract some of this basically just increase or decreasing the harshness and the weight is essentially what this will do and then let's try it again I'm not efficient with this but like I can imagine if you use this a lot you could actually be very with like posing your model in like a very in a rig type way right and so then we could I like that pose remove the mass to form go back to sculpt mode maybe you know select here yeah so I'm not efficient but like if you if you use this a lot I bet you could pose a character pretty quickly but I like this I like the I like the idea I like imitating the pose sort of mode from ZBrush but uh anyway so that's a cool feature and then mask decimate I love I love I love mask decimate because if you so often I run into you know I've scoped I've used dynamic topology I've sculpted a lot of detail in the face but I need to decimate the rest of it right I want to decrease the rest of the geometry for any or any number of reasons it's it's a common thing and then if I will adhere we have the option to go to sculpt mode I'll aim to clear the mask and let's let's say for example this face had a lot of detail you'll have to trust me on that besides looking at the wireframe so if we look at the wireframe let's also let's use that toggle wire option alright so I want to maintain this level of geometry but simplify everything else so let's decimate mask decimate to 0.1 and just like that it maintains it actually expands a little bit beyond the ah I always thought that interpolated but maybe it doesn't let's see if I use whoops go back to sculpt mode so I might need to get in the habit of like using a smaller area right so like smaller area mask decimate yeah okay so it does seem to do the the X to the extreme border is like the cutoff so maybe it doesn't interpolate like I thought maybe it is like a black and white one value but anyway in that case it would be on par with speed sculpt or vice versa but in this case it's so nice to be able to maintain a detail here but then get get the decimation everywhere else that is a tool that I've wanted for a while any other questions that I'm missing a question is there an add-on that doesn't exist that you would do yourself if you were neo there's yes yes for sure there is um yeah that's a rabbit trail there's a lot of ideas that I've had for improving workflow but often you know if I'm honest like it's kind of like one or two tools here and there when I think of add-on I feel like it needs to be a bunch of tools to be like warrant the add-on thing but I've I frequently like make macros and stuff but if there was one add-on if there was one add-on I would love to see ZBrush is queue remeasure or zremesher I forget which it is but the ability to like draw guide curves and like create an auto topology I would love that to be in blender I keep trying to push Jonathan Williams said to do that with retopo flow like add that feature one day but you know I would never use that for like real characters you know I just don't know that the technology will ever be good enough to like make a perfect character topology the way that he like a hand doing it hand by hand we would do by doing a by hand reach apology but I would love for that feature because there's background characters there's there's walls you know they're like organic cliff sides that would really benefit from that kind of feature so I would love to see that personally yeah Mudbox has that I know that I want to say 3d coat has an auto Rita poly yeah it definitely does it was one of the first to have an auto reads apology function so yeah like other software's getting it I really want to see it for blender and hopefully the Jonathan Williamson and Jonathan Denning will do that what three typos flow but we'll see and that question has me thinking now there's got it I think there's prey several and that I would have thought of that I would love the several add-ons I would love to see built one day but off the top of my head I'm I'm blanking besides the auto wreath apology mine would be like getting Photoshop functionality in the UV image editor ok in the UV image editor I would I supported the be surfaces add-on for several months because of that like it what it did for texture painting I was so into that I don't know if it's still actively being developed it seems the patreon has been kind of dead but um yeah it would be kind of cool it seems like you could just port that over to the 2d UV image editor you know a more robust layer system directly connected to the 3d view that would be awesome alright so ok I showed you mass decimate very simple but very very useful um we've gone a rematch I guess the last big one is the envelope builder I have no idea how this guy did it but he uses you know this is your your envelope rig system so you can pose it and and he's got some presets all human humanoid which is great if you wanted to pose a character but also um well let me I'm going to fast so this is great because especially with characters it would be nice to you know put your character in a pose initially and then once you get something you know like imposing it this way is very intuitive and you have control how to rig it the way you want if you want to I think I saw that this was not parented anywhere so like connected parenting those allows us to should allow us no it doesn't I assumed it would follow this but it did not I don't know what anyway posing the character this way is very intuitive if you ever use it armature so this is nice and how he managed to convert this to a mesh is beyond me oh you'll see that it popped back to the rest position let's undo that and instead let's go into pose mode and there's a way to clear transform transform I'm trying to figure out how to make this the new rest pose apply pose as rest pose there we go so now it will there we go apply that way Beshear has bee spheres instant meshes meshes is kind of cool oh that add-on yeah yeah did you try to invite the add-on developer to the live stream you know I Wes mentioned that I think he loves he likes the idea and I I want it to be objective right so I feel kind of bad if I if I have a bunch of notes and then I'm like hey come on in and talk to me I just critiqued your your add-on objectively maybe you know maybe I can be done fine but also based on the name he's probably international and and it's kind of a hassle to like schedule a test stream try and find a good time slot that works for them and me because 2 p.m. on at this time that we stream is only really good for me so yeah I like the idea but there's a lot of Hoops to jump through so I ultimately decided not to but we might do that for for the other add-ons if you guys like it we might try for it but you know it could change the time and all of a sudden be not not good for you or or you know I one of my biggest fears is like not being able to understand each other because of a you know like breakdown in in in language you know I have this story of when I went to see Graff I was so excited to meet Todd but I was terrified that I wouldn't understand him because you know he's got he's like half deaf I think and he speaks a certain way I was like I would just be so ashamed of myself if I couldn't understand this guy that I like idolize you know so anyway it scares me to think I'm not if I have a guest on and we don't quite understand each other or if I do a test stream and I decide we couldn't understand each other well enough anyway so I like the idea we'll see we'll see about doing it with other authors anyway so yeah the the the envelope builder I think is an incredible tool and beyond just humanoids like we can we can do our own from scratch and that was how I was anticipating like if the demo didn't go very long but we've actually been an hour I'll ask if you if you I have an idea for like creating a little dinosaur you know base mesh out of these envelope this envelope builder thing if you want to watch it but the fact that we can create custom things here and and it is just a I think a little it looks a lot like like the skin modifier initially but it's actually in my opinion more powerful in that let's see alt s yeah so alt s is how you increase the size but like I can I can duplicate this bone and just offset it slightly you can't do this with with UV with a skin modifier and then if you convert to a mesh like it maintains that thickness so like that is not something that I think you can do with the skin modifier so it's just a little bit more robust here and yeah so convert to the master that those are the tools I've gone over them all now I would so yeah I was thinking of the demo that I would do is on our site okay yeah I found this in our in our gallery submission that I I love this little character the VIP the vivid tour I was gonna you know block this guy out using the envelope builder just for fun and if you want to watch that maybe I'll do it so yeah let's say if you want to see it give me a one if you're if you're good if you've seen the add-on and we can call it a day give me a two but I'd be happy to do that for you if you want see if I have any other questions this is what speed sculpt has and I was really confused by it um speed sculpt has i watch this video I didn't see this directly in speed sculpt looks like a chromosome ha I haven't I looked through speed sculpt and as far as I could tell this is something that sculpts tools had a sculpt toolkit had over over speed sculpt but all right so if we want to see that sure I'll be happy to do that I believe I took a screen shot so I can load the image up in here desktop let's see um yeah all right so this VIP at or by the way the artists give them a shout out Alyssa they see I love these characters really good job I really wanted to as soon as I saw this I was like man I got a sculpt that thing that thing's great so thank you for submitting hope that's all right about that I use this see I'm not sure if it's mentioned but it's definitely in the add-on itself okay well okay that's good to know I guess speed sculpt also has this functionality I remember at CG cookie we were all really excited when they when he submitted this add-on because of this functionality and asking like how in the world did he did did he do this but apparently it's done elsewhere too anyway okay great um awesome all right so I'm just gonna take some time to casually block this guy out using a let's say I think I'm gonna start with the neutral character by the way there are several options here you got female you've got hero which I love look at this look how look how extensive you can be with this character with this tool and convert to a mash but very much likes v s-- z spheres like you get this definition so if you want to take the time to really build the shape out using envelopes um you get a great result like it it's very accurate to it so anyway i think that that is awesome the hero option will just go neutral and i really just want to start with the legs start with the legs and we will ya create this little guy thing i'm gonna delete everything above i also want to enable axis mirror for the armature so everything that's done is done on both sides all right so just gonna eyeball kind of the style of this of this block out alt s to increase the size just trying to create the knee shape alt s just eyeballing here we can subdivide it's a little bit weird how envelopes are selected though I can't find that to be a little funky like why is it not selecting that one where even is that I literally can't find that but strange alright it is a little bit of a different approach where you know as I pull this bone out lengthen it the the knee also grows in size so that is different than like this the skin modifier for example it the skin modifier does not work that way so that could be take a little bit of getting used to all right let's pull this out give them a wider girth and then here not quite used to the alt s hotkey yet give them some toes and then I'll just duplicate it just as long as these bones are intersecting it should convert to a mesh fine yeah but the only caveat is that if I wanted to pose it like in pose mode these would not be connected but I mean I'm not too worried about that right now we're just building I don't know why I can't can there we go very strange why in the world the selecting is a little bit wonky okay what if I switch I gotta figure out how to fix this so envelope what about octahedral weird so how do we go from this to this I mean where in the world is this bone at I don't know that's strange to me it doesn't make sense it looks perfectly symmetrical but in the middle we get this wonkiness all right whatever we will just kind of duplicate this that mean all right I just want to get another piece started for the body we do have to pee to like bones directly on top of each other let's see what I can do let me just delete these turnoff there we go all right so now you've got one set of bones right up in here sorry guys that was I don't since I don't use envelopes I got to get used to how they work it's a little different oh yes one thing that that I do miss about the skin modifier is that you can actually you know if I want to enlarge this I can just do it in a certain direction I can do it up and down or or width you know kind of skew it but here it's all just spheres so we can't do that so I'm gonna have to basically create another mass going up the top sort of thing maybe not yeah maybe not that seems to work fine and then we'll start to create the neck I'm losing my symmetry that's all right cool alright so we're just gradually blocking this thing out sort of looks like a chicken more than a dinosaur I'm trying to determine you know if I should if I should like how do I say it you know how detailed should we go with this you know if I ship deduplicate yeah well let's create another another bone this way but it's not symmetrical sis okay so you have to duplicate them together that's what it is guys what is happening what pick your battle scaling issues with envelopes or crazy geometry yeah I mean I have to admit that I think I just since I don't use envelopes as much as I as I was using this tool a lot I'd be using a ton of envelopes and in that way it wouldn't be this this weird-lookin but I should say that like envelopes are behaving strange right now what is that maybe it's just easier to like hop into octahedral mode yeah and fix it up a bit it's definitely different I did this yesterday and didn't have anywhere near this kind of trouble guess that's just the waste streams go maybe a little bit too long yeah we're getting pretty close but what I would want to do is like I want the duplicate work I don't understand some some of this stuff like I can duplicate bones sometimes other times I can't why why but like we can go down the side and just may I guess you could sort of do this with a skin modifier no I think that what I keep thinking about with the skin modifier is that you need a conversion to like boolean together your skin modifier options your skin modifier pieces whereas this just has the one like I can take these duplicate pieces and convert it all into one mesh but yeah if I was taking more time I think it would be worth it to block out the shape once I get faster you know working with the tool to be able to block out the shape even even like I want to create something like the brow shape you know like really get into sort of like the hero demonstrated like you can really be detailed with your shapes and like this is representative of the mouth the selection is funky it's very much me playing with it if you can't tell I hope the developer doesn't watch this and just shakes his head like this is not the best way to use it this guy doesn't know he's doing but since I don't have the other side symmetrical I'm gonna duplicate these scale them negative one I really like the brow shape it's got a it's got a lot of character yeah just the brow alone in my opinion but I can only imagine that for some people this is a much more intuitive you know once they get used to it and like once I get used to not bumbling around so much like this could be a much more intuitive way to block out some shapes before actually diving into sculpt with brushes drives me nuts that I can't maybe that's the issue I can't I have to duplicate a whole bone not just the end joint that's got to be what it is yeah so what I'll do instead uh it's getting somewhere let's let's try converting it let's see what that looks like so far start low I mean that's if you take your time that could be really nice I don't like what happened here well anyway if you take your time with it I think this is just a very powerful tool so I might call that a day just to show you a little bit of playing around with it but um cool if you have any last questions about this I think I saw one nope maybe I didn't I saw there just an all caps word Oh char good - whoops char good to see you thanks for stopping by have a good one but try elf for selecting all of the bone and that's a good idea good call oh yeah that is a good idea for some reason it seems to default to picking the bone that's behind the one that's on the back side that's kind of weird I can definitely get ctrl+ to go up to the full bone maybe that's a better way to do it then L so anyway I definitely have to get used to working with envelopes but looks like we're talking about dog descendants or something interesting yeah I mean the imagining like developing this character shape using this method seems very fun to me and yeah so I recommend you know give it a try consider the add-on if you'd especially if you sculpt a lot oh I wanted to ask so I don't have a stream scheduled or decided officially for next week so if you would like to see me go over speed sculpt basically kind of doing a comparison to this one I'm willing to do that it would also be sort of the same stream twice just with a different tool but if you want something unique someone else mentioned the lighting add-on from from studio lighting add-on from Andrew price so that's got a vote but if anyone has any other suggestions that here's the time to toss them out or any other last questions but uh other than that I'm gonna call it a day on this one so checking through the chat see if I missed anything [Music] okay so lighting add-on very nice I might check with Andrew just didn't I assumed he'd be cool with that but Rapp three can automatically fit a base mesh to a 3d scan what that awesome beyond just like a scan it'd be nice to like make one almighty facial topology and then wrap it to any sculpture you know like a sculpture of an ogre or a sculpture of a woman sculpture of a man that seems pretty cool rap X so this isn't a blender add on it doesn't look like just a just a application in general okay pearl IT studio I've seen Omar I've seen at least two for that but thank you for the suggestion rap 3 looks really interesting I'm gonna check it out very cool alright so we've got a couple votes for pro lute studio pro pro lighting studio looks like that one no one else was throwing any other ones out but I think so his lighting scenes were also converted HDR eyes but I could be wrong oh okay I'd like to see an add-on that resets the origin point without having to jump from edit mode to object mode I might have written that tool myself trying to remember I don't know how to get to it really quickly but I might have remembered wanting that and I think I might have put that as part of my my toolset I've seemed to recall doing that but yeah I mean that's just a simple macro you can you can tell Python to for your selected object go to object mode apply that that location and then jump back to edit mode but just to your perception it's a click of a button you're not jumping in and out yourself so it's that would be a pretty simple tool to do oh I mean the HR is on polygon cool all right guys well I think I'll let you go it's about an hour and a half yeah I hope you found this insightful if you if you a lot of sculpting maybe consider grabbing this add-on or at least trying it with the flow tools to beta so yeah with that said I will see you next week for some sort of add-on exploration but um cloth weaver mainly to know if it's worth the money cloth weaver I've heard of that one cloth weaver blender oh yeah I did look at this one Wow so it's only is that just me or is that 51 cents no longer available on the blender market okay interesting I don't know what happened here a new system for updating to my current users huh okay I'm not sure what it costs now but question I can't find rap 3 unless your bank's yeah I kind of thought it was an asset pack - yeah I don't know what happened to cloth weaver but something has happened it's a YouTube video about it probably anyway alright so I'm gonna I'm gonna let you guys go around 50 bucks yeah I'd have to be pretty impressive for 50 bucks I mean I basically expect like a simplified version of Marvelous Designer for 50 bucks awesome I'll let you guys go thanks for watching and happy blending I will see you in a week I'm good bye

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 33,287

Keywords: sculpting, blender, zbrush, zspheres, armature, metaballs, boolean, mask, extract, subtools, decimate, remesh, character, pose

Id: Fbt9U8FFOFE

Length: 86min 34sec (5194 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 01 2018