HOW to create alpha DECALS with Decal Machine in BLENDER Part 1

hi guys you're here with another tooth for blender and today we're gonna talk about decal machine and geo decals now first thing i want to say is that if you don't have patience go do some gardening seriously it's not for you okay decals require a lot of patience and a lot of time if you want to create good stuff that you can't take shortcuts in this game alright so with that said let's get started now this is a decal i created earlier today just for fun um it's a subset decal which means it's created from two elements i'll show you how to you know create cool elements and make it look clean you know like this okay all right so let's create a plane and let's first of all move um cursor to origin and our plane to cursor let's go to normal mode now i'll show you first because there are two different types of geo decals okay well actually i'm more of them but i'm gonna show you just subset and simple there's also a decal type called panels and these are created from edges but that's not for today's video okay so we're gonna do simple and subset now simple decals consist of one geometry which is a whole you know whole piece there are no other elements to it right so the first important the most important thing when you create decals with decal machine is that once you place your plane right in the middle of a scene and you do need to start with a plane that's important cannot be a circle cannot be anything else gotta be a plane and this plane whatever you do you do not touch it okay you do not move it you do not especially you don't move the origin point because the original point and the plane they gotta be flat okay they're gonna be at the same spot they're gonna just just don't leave them alone don't touch them all right and everything's gonna be good now let's um let's have some fun with it so let's inset it right and let's you know extrude it down scale it just a little bit and now everything you do you need to do it manually you can't for example use hard ops bevels because this is gonna mess things up okay you need to do bevels manually and there's a specific way of creating those bevels right you can't just do it with linearly so let's symmetrize it across first of all because i want to create this edge in the middle okay and the reason for it is because i want to remove these diagonal um edges over there so i'm going to press f and symmetrize it again so these edges are gone right now i'm going to grab these edges okay and bevel them and be generous with the bevel don't do stuff like this because you're gonna get you know fast as it looks okay you gotta be really generous with bevels and by generous i mean generous okay just go as crazy as you can this is not about geocount this is about you know being being smooth okay so really these bevels got i mean you know like crazy crazy smooth okay now this is our our base so you know we don't move this and this plane is gonna be uh the floating plane of a decal okay this is going to determine the the ground for the decal okay so literally i'm telling you again do not move this plane now let's extrude the middle so let's combine them together and let's go i and inset it and let's go let's extrude it scale it and maybe bevel it now you don't want to do two you don't want to go too high because you know when you want to go high just don't don't go too crazy you know don't go really crazy because this will not work especially with parallax okay parallax effect which means the height effect works uh best when it's actually the decals go deep into the mesh okay so let me show you what i mean um i'm just gonna apply one of my decals okay let's grab this one right this one actually sticks out so it's a good example so let me show you see now if you go to crazy up it's just really difficult to make it stick out visually and at the same time be really clean so you see this decal is really clean right you know it's a clean shading but if i go to d e and i'm you know start playing with parallax you know you can see that stretching starts to appear so you really need to be gentle with it okay especially when they're complex and they have a lot of tiny details right so now let's go back here and go back to our solid view and let's keep having fun with it we can actually make some cuts you can use you know box cutter for cuts right that's that's fine it's not a big problem just don't use bevels and do not use you know stuff like for example uh weighted normals i i would not recommend weighted normals uh let me see that preserve this one right so now the same with cuts okay if you're gonna go cards always look at the bottom of the screen with box cutter when you increase the number of you know verbs in a circle really seriously be generous don't be stingy with it because this you know this stuff is not the joke okay you gotta be as smooth as possible otherwise it's gonna look like so let's apply this and let's remove this cutter let's actually extrude it down and put a face on it now very important thing what the hell let's do it again there we go now very important thing you need to run all the edges um they need to be parallel to um to the bevels okay so in this case we want to run it across okay see to cut it and the same thing across here okay so actually you know what we're gonna copy so don't worry about it yet and remove this bevel everything needs to be precise and you know literally mathematically anal okay you can't about in here because any mistake and is gonna go to i'm not joking so let's grab this bevel here and let's actually um let's grab another one here bevels are really good to make things look smooth and hard edges look awful in decals so you really want to you know get those bevels going if you can let's make a chamfer and maybe uh maybe insert it in and then insert it one more time and then gz and sort of do something like this that's cool and we going to grab these edges mark them as sharp and by the way my sharp is set to apply and b weights archive these only so ctrl b and bevel d's and this one the same just mark and ctrl b and bevel it that's cool and this is beveled and this one needs to be bevel two you don't need the sharp edge of it already that's okay we fine now i'm going to copy this okay so i'm going to symmetrize it holding shift to all the edges and then i'll remove these things okay you don't need this okay so let's just remove all of these we don't need them we just need these so now you see we got the connection you need to check the connection as the connection is messed up we need to fix it so let's run an edge from here to here by pressing j and let's remove this entire edge okay you really have to be you know very precise with it and let's copy this again and then we need to remove the middle line okay and we should be fine we should be fine we should be fine now what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually run a sharp edge around here do not sharpen the external part of the of the plane okay internal is fine external i wouldn't recommend it um in fact yeah i think we can sharpen this one i think we can sharpen this one this should be fine all right okay let's try and bake it now bacon you click on the decal and you go to machine decal machine panel and now you're going to have automatically digital machine will tell you which what type of decal it is simple or subset it's a simple decal because it's only one object these settings now listen very carefully if you want to create decals that are actually really looking nice you need to go with the maximum quality i always go um especially with a resolution anti-aliasing is not so important but resolutionism is crucial not important is crucial let me show you the difference okay these decals right are decals that come with um decal machine they're created by a machine so the creator of the decals right let me show you the size difference so this is a decal that comes with decal machine and this is the code that i created okay and let me show you difference in quality now machines decals are really good but the resolution is simply not good enough for me so you know if you want to use them you can but they just they just fall apart you see that look at this decal it's just clean and that's what you want you want quality you want to spend time on it okay don't don't don't go cheap on decals because you know they last forever right so set this to maximum and then you can mess up with ao and contrast i really don't now i would leave this alone now this is important if your decal is actually really tall which means exceeds the um the height of one in bevel units you might want to go higher but to be honest i don't think you need to go that far and to be honest i never really messed with this i just don't need to so i'll leave literally everything as is the only thing i'm changing is the resolution and anti-aliasing okay and then what you do is you simply click on it and you create simple decal this will take time because creating degas at these settings takes a really long time it's you know my system is like probably a minute or two and i'm running really powerful system okay so it depends on the complexity of a decal and of course your machine but trust me you really want these settings okay now if you try to create a decal and you're not sure if the shading is good and everything is correct then you can run lower settings like maybe 512 within 256 but when you're baking the last the final decal you do want to go with the mock settings okay otherwise you're gonna end up with so i'll catch you in a minute when i'm gonna back that thing it took about two and a half minutes to back this little guy so let's uh let's grab him so make sure you grab the top of it right just to decal and the best way to test decals is on the sphere so what you want to do is if you have hard ups you go and create quad sphere right and you simply slap mud on it and you shoot it smooth and you're done so you know you want something shiny reflective and round because these surfaces are usually unforgiving so grab this decal and ctrl g place it on on a you know on the uh on the mesh you can scale it with s and then press d and you can project it you know you can adjust it if you want but basically what we want is projected but don't project it like that project it without so hold out project move your mouse up and project it then the projection is much more accurate this way and then adjust it with you know sd and now let's see you see this here you see these shooting issues and i'll tell you what's the problem look at that it looks like crop right it's fine here but in the middle it just looks like junk let me show you why it is now the reason for it is very simple okay the reason for it is that we simply did not make these edges sharp so what i would do normally and that's really important to remember to select these faces and you know remove these edges because we don't want these to be sharp and then simply sharpen it up and now we should be fine let me see let's sharpen this one as well sharpen this right you really need to make sure that everything is peachy before you can you let's sharpen this one as well and then this one is already sharpened but we can actually bevel it just to make it a little bit more round because light still gets there and now we should be fine so let's check it again we should sharpen these ones as well okay and again you gotta do everything manually right do not use hard ups like bevels and stuff just go manual full manual we could you know we could sharpen these ones it's not really necessary but you know just to be thorough we can just you know do that too i can't be bothered to mirror this so i'm just going to simply select these edges and sharpen them make sure you select the right ones not the one in the middle the inner edge but actually the outer edge okay so let's double check if we got the correct edge in here yes we did so let's just simply sharpen them and now we should be fine so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna re-rebake it okay so again create simple decal and now you bake that thing until it's perfect okay so i recently i bought a decal pack i'm not gonna show it because it's not a good practice you know but i bought a decal park for seven bucks in gumroad and you know they looked alright they were just bolts and stuff and i thought you know i just can't be bothered creating simple deals like this i'm just gonna buy it and the quality is rubbish the shedding is okay and because the person who made them is just lazy you know it's just lazy that's it or they didn't know how to do it properly but i'm just betting on lazy because they just went full on add-on stuff and you know just dropped maybe hot tubs levels on it and and you know and so on didn't take care of the shading and then you know they look fine from afar but when you add the angle on the refractive surface you can see the shading breaks all over the place so when you create decals the most important part is to have perfect shading all round because when you start adding parallax effect to it and you start you know dropping degas on the reflective surface it's just gonna look like dog breakfast okay so when you want to get into creating decals you make sure that you have a lot of patience and a lot of time because some of my decals took me you know more than two hours or three hours to create right it really takes time so anyway i'll catch you in a minute when i'm gonna finish baking the thing all right guys here we go let's check it out let's grab this plane in fact you know you could shift d so i'll explain why so one is here and we copied it in here because i have this feeling that this one's gonna be all right so let's project it and then you know adjust it a little bit with shift and go to shading mode and let's see how it looks now you see now it's clean see what i mean look at this it's baby s clean okay and that is how you want your decals to look okay now before you save it to the folder right what you can do is adjust the parallax effect and it will adjust for both of them so watch this and this right now if i click on this decal and go to d e right so i'm gonna go here adjust and e in the watch both of them gonna work you see now scroll it up to the minimum which means completely flat this is maximum this is flat and start adjusting it until you see a geo being pulled so zoom in really closely and go adjust e and zoom it and you scroll it up so power likes you know at the minimum and then start pulling it down and when you start seeing pulling like this you're going too far so you know you want to go deep but not too deep and that will ensure that deca is going to look beautiful so you know look at that look how clean this is see what i mean and that is how you create details okay so i don't want to see any on gumroad okay i want to see nice clean decals over there if you're going to put it on sale because that's just not good practice and the angles here they caused by the sphere which is not simply being subdivided enough so let's subdivide it some more okay and let's reapply this decal let's see if it's going to help or reapply it nope we're going to do it again so we're going to grab this decal and let's apply it again so d and let's apply it on the sphere project it and everything should be fine and now it's smooth you see so make sure your decals are actually lying on a smooth surface otherwise you're gonna have a bad day but look at this okay this this is smooth okay so that's how it's done now what you need to do is save it right so you might want to have a separate folder so you go to preferences and you go to decal machine under add-ons okay so you top decal here and you go all the way down uh and then here you need to type um the name of the folder i really have a youtube tutorial so i'm just going to leave it like that and then once you do that new folder is going to get edit okay so you type a name and press enter it's going to get edit and then you need to refresh it okay refresh the machine and save preferences so we check actually going to load it into this decal window and i have it in here now you select the top decal i see that's why we copied it because you cannot actually add it to the library from here it needs to be added from the position where it was created so once you create it do not move it okay just leave it leave it b so my decal is here right i'm going to grab this youtube 2 folder and simply add decal to library and now i can recall it from my library so if i go here i can recall it from that and this is how you create and add decals to your library okay now this is a simple decal okay that's important to note in the next video in part two probably tomorrow i'll show you how to create complex decals okay decals that actually inherit more than one material and i'll show you what i mean so if i drop a decal in here something from my from my library let's uh let's grab this one okay that's a good example right so let's drop it on okay and now watch this i can actually change not just one color okay but two and these are um subset decals okay so that's the difference between simple decal and subset decal okay so next vid's gonna be on subset decals when we're gonna dive into creating something more complex and trust me these guys are way more complicated than this simple decals okay they just cause more problems in terms of shading and and so on all right guys well thanks for watching hope you enjoyed the vid give me a sup and like if you did now if you do not have decal machine i'm leaving a link to detail machine mesh machine and also hard ups and box cutter add-ons in the video description so if you bite through that link you're gonna help me as well which is appreciated that's all for this vid guys thanks for watching and i'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 11,875

Keywords: decal, normal, alpha, normal map, decal machine, blender, textures, blender tutorial, blender tips, blender add-ons, hard surface, hard ops, boxcutter

Id: QNQB_Ubrorw

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020