How to Add DECALS with the Blender Shrinkwrap Modifier

what's up guys justin here with the cg essentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about how to quickly use the shrink wrap modifier to add decals to your models in blender let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so a decal is valuable because what it does is it allows you to quickly add detail to an object like for example let's say i have this object i'm going to shade it smooth with a metal material applied to it and i wanted to add some rust well instead of having to add geometry what we can do is we can use an image so i'm using an image that i downloaded from textures.com it's just the decals rusted0051 it's this one right here it's basically a png file with a transparent background with an image inside of it and so what we want to do is we want to use that image as a decal on this metal surface so the first thing we need to do is we need to import this and so the way we want to do that is we want to go to our edit preferences make sure that you've enabled import images as planes what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to import this object as or this image as an object inside a blender so then i'm just going to go to my front on view right here and i'm going to just do a shift a and i'm going to add an image images as planes if you don't enable the add-on this won't show up so we're going to select images as planes and then we're going to find an image in this case it's just going to be this textures.com decals rusted all right so then we're just going to click on the option for import images as planes and so i'm going to scale this down a little bit first thing you might notice is depending on your settings when you import this you might not get this as transparent right the transparency might not show up in here so what we want to do i'm going to make this a little smaller what we want to do is we want to go into our material settings right here if you don't see the transparency of this image so if you can't see through the area around this you just want to scroll down and you want to make sure that your blend mode is not set to opaque you want to make sure that it's set to alpha blend so if you set it to alpha blend you should get actual transparency inside of this image so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to move this so that it's aligned with the front of my object so i'm just going to go to a top down view move it over here then go to a front view and align it with the top of the object and so one thing that a lot of people do that's probably a good idea is you may want to go ahead and rotate this as well so that it's aligned a little bit better with the surface of your object so there's a few different ways you can make this simpler but we're just going to rotate it like this for this tutorial so basically what this is doing is it's currently sitting over your surface right here well now what we need to do is we need to tell blender to wrap this onto this object and so the way that we're going to do that is we're going to add a shrink wrap modifier so i'm going to go over to my modifiers over here and i just want to go to add modifier shrink wrap and so when i add a shrink wrap modifier it's not going to do anything yet what you need to do is you need to give it a target so you're basically telling it hey this is what i want you to wrap on top of so we're just going to click on the little eyedropper right here and then click on our object which is our sphere and so when i do this notice how it's not very impressive right there's a couple different reasons for that the first is that our offset is set to zero well when our offset is set to zero that means that this is basically trying to wrap this along our object but it's just kind of covered up by the object so i'm gonna move that out just a little bit we're gonna adjust this again in a second but notice how the other issue with this is it's currently just a hundred percent flat right so the reason it's a hundred percent flat is because there's no geometric detail inside of this plane so if i select it hit the tab key notice how there's nothing in here other than four corners right well the problem with that is that means that blender doesn't know what to do with this so what it's doing if i put this back to zero is it's basically moving the four corners to align with this object so notice how the four corners are on points on the surface what we want to do instead is we want to add some geometric detail and so you could tab into edit mode right click and do a subdivide which we may do in a second or we're going to do what we're doing here which is go in and add a subdivision surface modifier to your object and the first thing you want to do is you want to make sure the subdivision surface modifier is happening before the shrink wrap not after so we want this to add the detail before it shrink wraps it onto this surface and one other thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to switch this to a simple subdivision instead of the cap mold clark so switch it over to simple then notice how you're getting a little bit more detail in here not quite enough but a little more and we're going to go ahead and set our offset to maybe like a .005 something like that so that you can actually see it on this surface and so there's a couple other things we want to change as well so first off i usually change the wrap method to target normal project i find that gets me a better match on my surface i'm also going to turn this subdivision up to something like two instead of one and so notice how when i turn that up basically what that's doing is that's giving you more detail so it's actually able to map this along this surface and if you wanted to you could also tab into edit mode do an a and then right click and click subdivide and you can subdivide it a couple times before you apply the actual subdivision surface modifier over here that's just going to get you an even better result so now we've got this in here and it's giving us a pretty good result right and the cool thing about this is if i move this around to a certain degree it's going to move with my object so notice how it's shrink wrapping it on this surface if you move it down too far and you don't adjust the rotation your object you might get some weird results so that's something that just kind of be aware of and if i ever start having that issue like if i want to move it down over here i'll just switch back to this view i'll turn this off for a second and i'll just re-rotate it like this so that it's aligned with the surface and then i'll turn it back on so if you do ever want to make that change you can definitely do that and so one other thing to note just really quick is when you do this if you take an object like this one i've already subdivided this one but if you take an object like this one you shrink wrap it to another object like this notice how well first off i'm going to jump this off a little bit and we're going to switch this to target normal project and so this actually looks pretty good considering this is just like a typical cylinder with no actual detail in it so it's bending it along here pretty well but if you look at this you can see some seams where this is being bent along the surface well one of the cool tricks about this is you can come in here with your sticker right click on it and click on shade smooth so notice how when you do a shade smooth it does the exact same thing as if you were to shade smooth this object right here now this looks really clear so now you're not really getting those seams in here it's doing the same thing that it does with geometry with your uh with your decals so make sure that you're using shade smooth on your decals in order to make them look good when they're on a surface alright so leave a comment below let me know what you thought about this method if you have any questions i just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 42,006

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender shrinkwrap, blender decals, blender shrinkwrap decals

Id: IBjCro1B8fw

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022