How to Make Fabric Stitches in Blender (Couch Part 6)

if you've ever tried to create fabric seams in blender you'll know how frustrating it is you think it's simple because you've already sculpted the rest of the thing and then you go all right it seems let's just slap it in there and then you go wow it's really complex like you could sculpt it you could text your painter you could model it but they're all extremely time-consuming they require multiple objects baking blend is really bad at a lot of that stuff there's one method that's not bad for quick and dirty solutions I taught it in my teddybear tutorial using vertex colors but that does create artifacts blocky shapes and things and it's not very detailed the method I'm going to show you in this video is called the UV texturing method I was gonna call it the Andrew price copyright trademark seam method but I'll call it the UV texturing it's flexible it's it's non-destructive and it doesn't increase the render times at all and it is super realistic it's the sharpest of all the even if you bake it it's sharper than that is great so let's get into it so this is where we left off with our couch the cushions looking good all textured all good but they are missing seams by the way if you're wondering someone in the comments header I think the base is too sharp I disagree I would love to cut my leg open on the side Nick's couch of course we will be beveling it don't worry it's just easy so I've just left it right to the end the cushions is the main bit that's that's you know focus on what matters and that's that's the hard bits here so anyways we are going to select one cushion that we're going to apply our owl seam to I'm gonna hit number pad slash which takes you into local mode just FYI and go into edit mode and this is where we're going to get into our seams so we're gonna split our view here go to the node editor and this is where we actually add in our our seam so we're going to be using an image texture of a seam and thankfully there are plenty around because that's what brushes use so if you look at Z brush brushes substance painter brush whatever is based off a displacement that's is being drawn out onto something that's what we're going to use we're not going to use it like as a brush we're gonna just use the texture in the node editor so I'm gonna be using this texture from polygon obviously you don't have to buy this one from me you can let me scrounge around in the rubbish bin maybe I'll find a couple of bucks in there to feed my family but it doesn't matter where you got it from but you need one I'm sure there are some free ones out there but anyways I'll put the link for this one in the description as well as a link for this one which is actually free you just have to have a free account at polygon and you can download this one it looks pretty similar to the one that we're gonna use in this so go ahead and get that but anyways once once you've downloaded it we're gonna go texture image texture and we're just gonna load in open a map that looks like this so this gray displacement map essentially it this one is actually a Photoshop file but blender reads Photoshop files now so that's nice make sure you set this to non color data very important and yeah we're gonna use this as like in the bump map part of the channel so where the bump map is currently being occupied by our creases which we did in the last step so I'm just gonna temporarily override that they're very easy to blend later on but let's just so we can focus on the seams just put that in there and you won't be able to see anything because it's it's too low by the way shout-out to Ally 32-bit in the last video he commented and let me know that you shouldn't actually be changing the strength value of a bump map which is what we did for the creases in the last part instead just leave strength at one and instead adjust the distance value and I tested it and it's totally true it actually adjusting strength like crushes and compresses the values into like this doesn't look right whereas distance actually like keeps the dynamic range and kind of like moves it down anyways very important so that's what I've done I've just set the distance really low but anyways I got to increase it now because we want to actually see what our texture looks like okay so it's just like a fake a fake bump alright now the reason this is really huge and over the top of the mesh there is that it is using our UV map so if we lo if we split the view again and then go UV editor I'll just hit X there go into edit mode and you can see this is how UV map that we had from before so we don't want to adjust this because this is what our fabric is using you know the correct scale for our fabric instead what we want to do is create another UV map which you might not have done before but you end up doing that sometimes when you get advanced into texturing and we just want to rename this I'm gonna call it seems by the way I don't know why I don't know if yours is the same if it's just me double-clicking doesn't work to rename something it's triple click I need to triple click never had that in any software before but I'm like how come how am I supposed to like rename this thing and I was like hitting it like a lot and then it finally just worked triple click I guess that's a bug but anyways seems ok once you've done that then by default if you don't have anything connected here it's just going to use the default UV map which is the one that has this active camera next to it so instead because we want this to use just this new UV map we go input UV map and then select from the drop-down seems and then connect it like that now I y'all notice nothing has changed and that's because when you create a new UV map it just duplicates the one that you previously had this so it's just using identical identical UV map so what we want to do now now that we've got this separately set up is we can just completely rack our UV map here destroy it and make it just a line with where we want seams to go so if we load in that image that we just put up there into the UV image editor load this just so we can see it there it is like so you can see that it's it runs vertically top to bottom and there's like the one place that that the stitch is so what what I want to do is go into face select mode up there and then I want to select holding down alt and hold down alt and shift to select two rows of wherever I want there to be a stitch okay then you can see that we've now just isolated that in the UV map and you can see that if we were to line this up over here we would get a stitch that would appear right there now this is fiddly I will be honest this is the worst part of this entire method is it's a lot of buggery with the UV the UV layout so what you need to do is essentially select an island by hitting L and then in your properties this is the easiest way I found that any way is to set this to 0.5 and then it will position that exactly in the middle then if you repeat that for all of the islands that you have in this case we've got one down here that's lying down so I'm gonna hit R to rotate and then type in 90 for some reason it's like really slow at the moment any editing in the UV image editor is slow and it's not to do with it being displayed over here it's just it's really frustrating that's what makes this step it's like there's a lag between every little clicking and button press anyways once you've done that you can see that they're all lined up exactly in the middle and if I select them then hit s to scale upwards and then if I increase this provided I've done everything right we should see on the left hand side some stitching start to appear and that's the gist of the tutorial hopefully now it's clear exactly what we were doing yeah and because this is a tileable you know it's a brush right so it should be tileable there's no like visible seams within this seam and I know it's also like crystal like because it's perfectly like when you brush something with a brush you never get it like perfectly lined it always comes out blurry depending on you know whether you're looking at it front on but this way it's perfectly crisp and clear so it's great now this horrible seam up here you can't remove something from like a UV map however I like without like making it an entirely new material but what you can do is in your edit mode here if we select everything other than the area that we want this stitch to appear on so control I will invert our selection so we've now got everything else if I was to I mean if you just reset it so you and then reset it puts all of those faces like completely occupying overlapping just the UV layout and then if I hit s and then like point one something really small you can see it's it's made it this single small face and you can see the left and right hand side have gray and we're going to toe blender that that gray part should be treated as like no bump like completely ignore it so provided we position it somewhere to the left or right let's go out of that you can see that we don't have any stitching appearing so it's actually like part of this texture but it's not really because it's just a completely flat uniform part of it so it's kind of like I don't I was quite proud of myself hmm when I discovered this I'm sure I'm not the first one but I was like yeah but it's not bad it kind of works quite well now something you'll note is that there's this kind of like this annoying lip and that's because this is a brush and it's designed for displacement so you know there's a lip with a stitch there's a lip where it goes down but it doesn't really look right necessarily with our mesh because the rest of the mesh isn't affected by this so it just kind of looks a little weird so what I want to do instead is tell it basically don't treat this gray area like great because actually it's also kind of raising that a little bit anything that's great is being slightly raised the bump map treats things that are black as level and then everything lighter just goes above it but this is yeah yeah it's not all we want so what I want to do is right between here and here I'm gonna add in a map range node you could do this with a color ramp node but supposedly the map range node preserves dynamic range better it's a little yeah a little janky to figure out like I had what is these values do from just means like the values that you start with to is the values that it outputs so we want to keep the to exactly the same because we want to keep the dynamic range at zero to one but the from we want the gray value of like a point five ish to begin to we want that to become black so that's just our control shift click on this we can actually visualize what's happening but if we were to increase this you can see that eventually at around about point four it gets to the stage where everything is ignored and nothing is there and or that the stitch appears right so that's basically what I want so if we have a look at this now through here the lip is gone and you know you can play with this you know if you weren't happy with it you can make things like completely dissolve just with that range there but that's pretty good and obviously if this is overkill for you you can turn down the distance value there to be something a little less offensive you don't want this like jarring bump appearing there now we were I moved the creases so we want to add that back in here so thankfully a you know this is black and white and this is black and white that's really easy to combine so we can do that with uh it's gonna be blending two white values right so what we want to do mix about our mix RGB take this and put this in here this and put this in here and then I'm gonna set this to screen because it's taking light I like combining light with light if it was black with black you'd use multiply but anyways so what I want to do is I want to keep the bottom value at the map because the because you're combining them and you're putting them into one bought map node you want to set the distance for the maximum one like the most distance should be the one that's occupying the top so this stitch should be should be above the the wrinkles essentially and now that I've done that provided that is coming through correctly if we look through here we should see there should be some faint wrinkles appearing maybe do we have any wrinkles oh oh of course I didn't even okay I didn't even add it into the height box that would be why when we do that we should see an overkill of wrinkles come on now oh it's been a long day this might be one of the most tricky tutorials I've done because it's like so many little intricate little steps and trying to teach it in a way which is easy to digest but anyways okay so I wanted that to look like that provided you've got the stitches to the right height if you want the wrinkles to be more like less than what you have there you would use to adjust this but I mean that looks okay for now we can adjust that later if needs be but anyways so we've done you know you might want to put a little stitch going down here you might not sup to you but one thing I want to show you is that the first time I made this tutorial I literally said you're gonna have to repeat this step across every couch every cushion and you will have to do it separately for here and here however if you've got objects that have the same number of edges you can copy the UV layout I only just learn this like you're learning it at the same time as me because I between recordings I discovered this you can copy the UV layout so what you do is just like when you copy a material you hit like you know ctrl L right and you would select materials but you can transfer UV maps what you need to do before because we've got two UV maps we've got seams it'll transfer to whatever is active so for each of the objects before you transfer it you need to create a new UV map and then call it seems okay so like that click seams and then make sure on each of the objects that the seams is the one that is selected all right and then holding down shift and select the last one that you've just done the UV layout for last so that should be yellow then hit ctrl L and then transfer UV maps and if you've done it right crossing your fingers it should have copied those UV layouts which is incredible I was like oh my goodness that makes this method finally not so tedious it is a little tedious I I won't lie but at least it's not terrible now I will leave you to do the rest of these cushions by yourself however I do want to mention show you one little thing because while this one had perfectly straight things that the squares were perfectly square and laid out some of yours might not be like in this case here these are kind of crooked so I'll show you what I mean let's say we want to have these edges rows whatever we call them rows of faces we want to have them running through the middle here well if we were to do the exact same thing as we did before first of all make sure you create a new UV map otherwise you'll be editing the other one and you'll hate yourself because you'll have to go back rotate that by 90 if we were to put all of these in the middle right just like what we did before select this one and select this and go to point five let's just make this a little bit bigger so we can do this a little bit better yeah this is one of those tutorials that is yeah you could get lost on pretty quickly because it's a lot of pissing around with UV maps so when we do this you can see that the this line isn't perfectly straight so it's all kind of wonky right and that is not ideal in fact if you were to look at how it looks on your actual mesh you might see at some points it starts to clip through provided it's not clipping through it's not a problem all right but let's say yours was clipping through its kind of clipping through down there right what you need to do is essentially hit B to do box select and then just mouse over it like that and with all of that edge selected hit s X and then 0 and that is how you straighten something in blood it's annoying it's really annoying there is a UV so there's an add-on called UV squares which is great it is a paid product however you can get it off github for free it's one of those I think you know you can buy it to help support the developer but it's really helpful basically it has this little tab down here and then you just click to grid by shape and then will automatically do that for you and that's a huge time-saver so I definitely recommend that I'll put the link in the description the blender market as well as the github link so you can you can all access it but anyways so now that you've done that you could see obviously it's a lot easier to control those but yeah that is the thing that's you're gonna have to do so one thing to also note is like don't overdo it like you don't have to put seems wherever you have seams in your model right that would take a really long time so for example this actual pot of like these side on cushions I don't have the reference here but that's actually one continuous pace there isn't a scene that goes down there I think seems a generally undesirable for furniture makers they don't want to have seams everywhere so where they can get away with having one continuous face they will so you only need to have one seam going that way and also don't put seams we're not going to see it like don't bother doing the backside of that if you're not going to see the backside of it you might need to if you're gonna transfer it to another object but yeah like just you know use use your time wisely anyways with all this said what I'm gonna do now is jump to I'm gonna finish doing these faces here so I'm gonna put ones there there and there oh actually sorry I should actually teach you this part as well okay so one more thing right so this right where it connects sorry where well let's let's change this view here because that's very frustrating where this big joint into this stitching here there's no real easy way to do it you will have to just sort of make them sort of smash together it's better if there's not a gap right sometimes this part here that can be like a big gap here so it's actually preferable I found to have the UV map sort of jut into another stitch and then you know do it that way rather than having a big gap because the gap will be more obvious to the camera rather than the you know the smashing into the the other stitch which is what we're doing right now so you know it's it's not you know that's not particularly pretty but you know when you the camera is far away over here you've got cushions you've got everything on it it's highly unlikely somebody is gonna nose and go oh that doesn't line perfectly with the stitch above it right like it's it's it's unlikely so with that in mind I'm going to continue now to the final result of all of these done and I will see you there and we are now done so you can see I added seams in some places and let the viewer fill in the imagination you know there's a seam under there there's a seam under there I just put one at the top you know take shortcuts where you can it doesn't take that long I don't know 15 minutes it's just a lot of clicking you feel like you're gonna get carpal tunnel but you know you do it once and then and then you find but you also have to do it for the frame because our couch has a soft body frame why why you do this why not just make it like Plexiglas or I don't know metal right who wouldn't want a metal steel frame of a couch right so we got a yeah we got to make this we got to make it soft right so thankfully it doesn't involve any sculpting you could actually do sculpting since there's technically like a little bit of waviness in there but hey there's only so many hours in the day so what we're going to do is add a bevel all right oh I'm wearing headphones that's weird I felt like I was shouting and it's like yeah I am probably shouting so the bevel when you add a bevel modifier you can see that it's kind of yeah it's terrible because our scale is not set to 1 right so clear your scale and then you get that so make sure you do that for all of your objects sorry all the the frames then you can see that these two objects here they have a mirror modify being used and except this one down here this one doesn't so I am going to make this one a mirror so I'm just gonna delete that face in the middle man move this across and then now that I've done that I should be able to select all these three here and then hit ctrl L modifiers and now it's copied that modifier okay and I'll move this across because it's got clipping turned on okay so I'm just trying to save time and sort of batch do these operations I'll change my offset to be something like that so this is essentially now where we get to decide how smooth do we want our corner to be how much you know like fabric do we want it to look like we do have to make a seam appear along there so you might want to give it just like a little bit a little bit extra then then what it comes with and as fully a number of segments you know it's totally up to you I think the problem is you want to have a seam right in the middle of this you can see I don't know if I can actually move my camera in but there is a sort of triangle like that and that's good that's what you want because then it's easy to place a seam along those you know going all the way down there and all the way down there whereas if you had three you wouldn't be able to as easily do that so you should either go to segments or four segments in my case I'm going to go four all right now that I've done that make sure everything else is okay and then I'll click oh I actually want my bevel to be above my mirror modifier because that'll save me that'll save me some time so I'll hit control L and then select modifiers and now these two should have copied on oh one other thing is well limit method if you don't select angle it means that it's going to be creating like a bevel even here where there shouldn't be a bevel but it'll try and create one so select angle and then it will then it will do that for you so let's do that controller modifies okay cool so now I've done that I'm going to apply my bevel apply it like that oh it only did it for the top one so make sure you do it for the bottom ones as well and then we're going to because we haven't UV unwrap this right so we have to we have to do that so I'm as you can see selecting the middle edge along this all the way along and this is obviously where the seam is gonna go previously we didn't have to select all these because we just select like select similar and when sharp or whatever but because this is a bevel that's not gonna particularly work very well so you just have to do it but thankfully that these are pretty simple geometric objects so it's it's not too hard alright so once I've done that ctrl e same go UV image editor and hit the you button right select it you unwrap alright now I'll speed that up whilst I do the exact same thing for these two down here alright all the objects are now done so I can select these and then select my cushion here that I want to copy the material from last control l and materials and now it has the fabric now something you'll probably notice is that it's like a long like this face here you can see that looks really like screwed up like it's all something's going on there and that's because it's a bevel and sorry yeah it's got a bevel on it and it doesn't really know how to handle it when you hit you and you went on wrap you can change the method from angle base to conformal which is something that I have literally just discovered as I'm recording this and that will fix that whole bevel problem and yeah that looks a lot better the other thing is is that the scale of this because you don't want to have to adjust the actual scale within the material because then it will adjust the scale for all of these as well I just want to have to it I just want to adjust this UV map to the right scale so I'm just gonna scale this up until these threads at the top here match the threads down there or vice versa I guess alright do the exact same thing down here you unwrap and then select Kanaan conformal conformal and then crease that until that's matched and then do the same thing right here excellent and then of course we need to do the exact same thing that we did without questions here to create a seam so I'll do one and then it's up to you right and when the teacher says that I'm gonna do one on the board and then you need to do it in your own time or for homework what's up with homework huh you know now that you're an adult it's like you think about what on earth where the teachers doing giving kids like six hours of work to do when they get home like they're already learning in school right and then they just like I don't know this is like not an original point since a number of people have said it far better than I have but it's like this is kind of dumb right like what are we doing here with these kids it's uh yeah like I heard like my sister's daughter she's got a 8 year old seven year old something like that and you see it's like a couple of hours homework each night it's ridiculous it's like so instead of like drawing or like playing socializing with kids they'll just be I'll just be doing stuff like that which is which is not good now why is this not working exactly oh there it is okay I thought it just wasn't displaying at all I was getting worried that the scene wasn't appearing it is there it's just really small so anyways continue that for these objects I'll do that now and we've finished finally I feel like celebrating I've got the seams that go down here I got seams all the way around it you know takes 10 15 20 25 minutes depending on what's going on a couple of things I'll just make as a change is yeah obviously those creases are like way too high it's probably bugging a lot of you so as I think I mentioned you've got to set the distance to whatever you want the maximum bump to be apt since we're combining two things and then the screen value will control whatever is in the bottom one which in this case is the creases so if I want the creases to go down but not the seams I just need to adjust that like that and then I have little fine wrinkles over everything but nothing more oh and also make sure of course that whenever you've got wherever you have seams sorry wherever you are not supposed to have seams of course that that is clear and in this case you can see I forgot to do that so you know I didn't do it deliberately so that I could remind you guys no I really didn't it's a mistake but there we go one final advantage to doing this method is that we can actually color the stitches or at least you can if you're using the brush that I am because along with the brush having this we also get this thread map and because that'll line up with exactly this all we need to do is make sure we use the exact same seams and then this is a black and white mask so if we add that into this base color here we can make the thread color anything we want so all you do is you add in a mix RGB node drop it in right there and then take the output of this and put that into the factor input so that is now acting as a mosque and now this color here becomes those little seams there there's little stitches stitch threads whatever you want to call them and that's really cool so you know you can go as a ggressive or in aggressive as you want probably bright red is not the wisest design decision given the subtlety of the rest of the couch but something small can can just add again one of those little things that will trick your brain into believing that what it's looking at mustn't be a Renda because who would go to the trouble of you know coloring the threads of a couch so yeah our couch is technically now finished so big clap and all that but it is a little bear you know typically when you have a couch in a room there's some stuff on it right a little throw cushion something and this is actually the fun part which is adding adding a cushion which gives you an opportunity to throw some artistic flair into it make it a bright red or a yellow and a blanket you can throw that on it so that's going to be the next part of this tutorial is adding in throne cushions in a blanket so click here when the video is available and I will see you there

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 212,590

Keywords: blender, tutorial, fabric stitch, stitch, fabric seam, seam

Id: BcWM9PBCVHw

Length: 29min 53sec (1793 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020