How to Texture Paint Bump Maps in Blender (Tutorial)

in this tutorial I will show you how to texture paint bump maps in blender and if you'd like to learn the basics of texture painting in blender then you can check out my texture painting for beginners tutorial with the link in the description and also after this video if you'd like to learn more about texture painting in blender then you can also check out my texture painting tutorial playlist and learn more about texture painting and then after you finish texture painting the bump map if you want to turn your Bump map into an actual normal map so an actual blue and purple normal map then you can simply bake the bump data to a normal map and I have tutorials on my YouTube channel on how to do texture baking so if you'd like to check that out I will have a link in the description to my texture baking tutorial playlist if that is something that you want to do or you could just keep it as a bump map so for demonstration in this video I'm just going to be using this Cube here and I gave the cube a bevel modifier and then shaded it smooth so the edges are smooth so the first thing that we need to do is create a material on our object so I'm going to click right over here here on the shading tab so I'm just going to click on the new button to add a new material and then on the base color here I'm just going to make this like a blue color and make it a little bit darker so it's kind of easier to see I'm also going to hold down the Z button and go into the material preview alright so the next thing that we need to do is create an image that we can actually paint on so I'm going to press shift a I'm going to go here to the search and I'm going to search for an image texture and let's put this right down here and then I want to click on new to make a new image texture now we can create a name here so I'm just going to call this like Cube bump and then right here on the width and height I want to make this higher quality I'm going to make it a 4K texture so I'm going to click and then drag down and then let go and this way you can change both values at the same time and I'm going to change this to 4096. that is the standard resolution for a 4K texture and I would recommend keeping the quality decently High because if it's a very low texture it might look a bit pixelated and it might not look that high quality so I think 4K is a pretty good resolution now on the the color here we do want to change this because we don't want it to be fully black we actually want it to be a mid gray color in the very middle so if you click right here on RGB I'm going to click and then drag down and let go and this way we can change all the values at the same time and I'm going to punch in 0.5 and then hit enter so 0.5 is going to set it in the center there so it's fully white and then it's going to set it right here in the middle and while we're doing this is because we're going to paint lighter values and lighter values are going to make it look like the mesh is popping out and then darker values are going to make it look like the mesh is going in so we want the base color to be this mid gray color and then we can paint lighter and darker values for the bump now there is one other really important thing that you need to do when you're creating the bump map you need to check mark the 32-bit float because if you don't do this then it's not going to be as high quality and so the bump map is actually going to look kind of pixelated in low quality you can see right up here on the screen these are the kind of issues you can have if you don't set it to 32-bit float so I want to check mark the 32-bit float so that it is very high quality and that way the bump map is going to be much more smooth and then I'm going to click on ok now another way to make your Bump map more smooth and higher quality is to click on the linear right here and I'm going to change it to cubic and this will make it look a bit better as well now this is a bump map so it's not actually going to contribute to the base color of the texture we're going to be putting it into the normal with a bump so we want the color space here to be set to non-color and then we can take the color here and we're going to put that into the normal now we need to convert this to normal data so what I'm going to do is press shift a go here to the search and I'm going to search for the bump node and we're going to drop the boat node right here in between these two nodes and then we want the color to be going into the height value this way it's going to convert the black and white data that we'll be painting into normal data that the principled Shader can use and then the last really important thing you need to do is you need to make sure your object is UV unwrapped so if you you go over here to the UV editing layout you can uvan wrap your object and you can see this object has already been UV unwrapped now if you'd like to learn the basics of UV unwrapping in blender then you can check out my uvn wrapping for beginners tutorial with the link in the description and in my texture painting for beginners tutorial I Do cover some important things when you are setting up a UV map for texture painting So now to do the texture painting I'm going to click right over here on the texture painting workspace and this is going to take us into texture painting of the object and it's also added the image editor here so we can texture paint on the flat image if we want to but I'm just going to click and drag this down and make it smaller because I want a texture paint on the actual 3D object and then we also have some different settings right up here for texture painting and right over here on the active tool and workspace settings we have some different settings here and I'm going to hold down the Z button and go into the material preview because I don't actually want to preview the black and white values that we're painting I actually want to preview what this is looking like with the bump and then for the texture painting I I'm also going to be using my Wacom pad tablet and I would highly recommend using a drawing tablet for texture painting if you're able to because texture painting with the drawing tablet is much better than texture painting with a mouse for many reasons and I go over that in more detail in my texture painting for beginners tutorial and if you're interested in purchasing a drawing tablet I will also have some Amazon links in the video description to some tablets that I recommend and those are affiliate links so if you make a purchase through those links that will help me out but with no extra cost to you alright so you can click right up here to change the color and I'm going to start by making this fully white and then I can just start to paint here and you could also change the radius and the strength I'm just going to start to paint here and you can see now it actually looks like it's being popped out of the mesh because this is white however if I make this fully black now if I paint you can see it looks like it's being pushed into the mesh so that is super cool and so this could be very useful if you want to create like some worn edges or just paint some other normal onto the object now there are a few different brush settings that I wanted to show you so if you click right up here on stroke you can click on the stroke method and you can instead change this to Anchored so if this is set to Anchor you can click and drag or I'm pressing down with my tablet and you can make this bigger and then place it and so this is a really great way to create some different bolts or rivets you could also click here on stroke and you could click on the stroke method and you could change this to line instead and then I'm going to press the F key to make my brush a bit smaller and you can press down on your tablet and drag a line over and let go and you can see it's going to create that cool sci-fi detail there so this could be very useful if you want to create like some sci-fi plating or some sci-fi details on an object you could paint this into the bump and it kind of looks like there's some sci-fi plating there and then if you want to add some bolts or rivets you could go back here click on the stroke method and change this to like anchored and then I could just like click and drag and I could pull out some little dots there and also if I wanted to create a bunch of bolts or rivets on the edge what I could do is I could and click here on the stroke method and I'm going to change this back to line and then I could turn up this spacing here so I could make the spacing really big and then I can drag a line here and then I can let go and you can see it's going to make a bunch of rivets or bolts there and that looks really cool it almost looks like something that you would see on a plane Wing or some other piece of metal although actually those rivets are going back in so what I'm going to do is press Ctrl Z to undo this and I'm going to click here on the black and I'm going to instead make it fully white and so if it's white it's going to make it pop out so then I can do this again and I think I actually might turn up the spacing a bit so now I can click and drag bring that over and let go and you can see now it looks like we have some little rivets there so those are some cool things you can do with the stroke method if you want to change it back to the default you can change it back to space and then the default spacing is 10. and then this will allow you just to kind of freehand it and just kind of paint along now I also want to show you how you can paint with a texture so what I'm going to do is go right over here to the side panel go to the active tool and workspace settings and I'm just going to close all these and then I want to open up the brush settings and then I'm going to go right down here and open up the texture and then I can click on the new button to create a new texture and then to add in a texture I'm going to click on this button right here and this will take me to the texturing panel and then you could click on open here and actually open up an image texture if you have an image texture on your computer but instead of using an image on my computer I'm going to use a procedural texture so on the type here I'm going to change the image or movie to clouds and this is basically going to use blender's procedural noise texture and then on the depth here I could turn this way up so that it is more detailed and you can also play around with some of the other settings here like the noise basis there's some different things you can play around with and also right here if you open up the colors I'm going to turn up the brightness a little bit and also turn up the contrast a little bit alright so once you've set that up you can click right back up here to go to the active tool and workspace settings and I'm just going to make this like a mid gray color something like that and then also right here on the mapping I want to make this more random so change the mapping here from tiled to random and then I do want to turn the strength down quite a bit because I don't want it to be super strong so I can now just paint along here and you can see we're giving some cool noise there to the metal so this is a really cool way to add like some worn edges on the metal make it look like it's been banged up and old and it looks more like metal if you wanted to make the noise texture very bumpy all over the place you could also make your brush really big and you could turn the strength way down and then you could kind of go along here and you could add some noise there so that is super cool and that definitely looks like a more realistic metal because it's all worn and bumpy I could also just like paint a few areas here and there and it kind of looks like the metal has been banged up or hit with a hammer and then if you want to smooth anything out you can press the T key and that's going to open up this side panel here and you could use the soften brush or also the smear brush I'm going to use the soften brush you kind of go along here and smooth anything out if you want to smooth some things out there or also the smear brush I can press the F key to make the brush bigger and you can kind of smear that around but that looks very cool it looks like a banged up metal and then once you're done painting the texture it's very important to save the image to a file on your computer because if you don't save the image then when you close blender blender is not actually going to save the texture data so I'm going to click right here and I'm going to drag out and this is going to show me the image that we've painted so you can see it's just white and black values and that's going to tell it to bump in or out so to save this image you can click here on image and you can click on save as and then I will save this as qbump.png in a folder with my files and I'll save this as a PNG image and then I'm going to click on save as so I can now click right back over here to the shading workspace and if you want to change the strength of the bump you can just turn the strength value down right there so if you want to make it more subtle you could just turn down the string now this isn't actually a normal map it is a butt map because it is just black and white data and then we're using the bump node to convert it to normal data and this works totally fine but if you want to turn this into an actual normal map one of those purple and blue Maps then you can simply bake the normal data and it's going to bake this into a normal map and if you'd like to learn how to do that then I will have a link in the description to my texture baking tutorial playlist where you can learn how to bake a normal map and the method for baking normal Maps works exactly the same because this bump node is going into the normal so when you bake a normal map it's going to bake the normal data which is going into the Shader so that is how you texture paint boat maps in blender so I hope you found this video helpful and thank you for watching and if you'd like to learn the basics of texture painting in blender then definitely check out my texture painting for beginners tutorial with the link in the description and you can also check out my texture painting tutorial playlist to learn more about texture painting and if you found this video helpful and you'd like to help support me and this channel then I will have links in the description to my gumroad and my patreon and the YouTube membership ships those are all great ways to help support this channel but I hope you found this video useful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 70,429

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, bump, bump maps, texture paint bump, normal maps, texture painting, texture painting blender, paint bump maps, texture maps

Id: WizT4jakNBs

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022