How to Use Alphas/Textures for Sculpt Brushes

hello in this series I will be looking at how you can add minor details to your scopes quickly and easily using texture brushes you can find the first video in the description and there's a card in the corner now in this video the second video we're looking at how you can add these textures to your brushes and the third will show you how to create your own you can find this course and other free courses like it on gabot co uk and do ask any questions in the comments below and i'll get back to you alternatively you can join the discord server and ask questions there or just chat and maybe join in some of the competitions I'm using blender 2.8 you can find a link to how to do this in blender 2.79 in the description and they'll be a card in the corner again so first of all I'm going to set up my mesh for sculpting I'm going to join these two areas by right clicking here and saying join area and moving my mouse downwards so I can make full use of my screen I'm going to subdivide this cube in the middle by pressing ctrl v that will add a subdivision surface if I show you that in the spanner or the wrench over here I've added a subdivision surface with five levels so control five or four would be four levels and so on I'll apply that and that's given me this level of detail in my sort of QB sphere thing back into object mode with tab the last thing I'm going to do is add a multi resolution modifier so this is a fairly detailed mesh but it's not detailed enough in order to add the minor details from a texture brush if I quickly go into sculpting mode and sculpt on it you can see it's still quite sort of pixelated in a strange way and that's just because we've got a low amount of faces so I'll undo that and go back to layout mode what I'm going to do then is add a multi resolution modifier and subdivide it around five times now what you will want to look for here is the face count I have an i7 fourth-generation CPU and that will take up to about 6 million faces fairly comfortably and I would say most modern good CPUs will do that and if I subdivide this now to that sort of level I've got four at the moment and we're on 1 million a one and a half and subdivide once more bit of lag a bit of delay were six million so now when I go across the sculpt mode you can see I can get a nice lot of detail without any of that sort of pixelation look so I'll undo that it's worth noting that the multi resolution modifier is the best way to add this sort of detail if you have a mesh that you've used the dying topo for then you'll have to do what's called a detailed front fill I have a separate video about that which I'll put in the corner now so how do we add the textures to our brushes well what I'm going to do I'm on the basic scope to draw brush over here and that gives me this brush I'm going to add a new brush with this icon here and call it texture that way I can easily revert back to my draw brush by just clicking this icon and going back to the sculptural so whenever I'm in the basic draw brush I can go across to here and choose my text you want or my draw one it may be that this will change in later releases of 2.8 and it might be up here so I want to add a texture to this therefore I go down to the texture panel and pull this out what I'm going to do as well is just bring this out slightly and bring out a new window and I'm going to change this one to the texture tab that way when I add a texture here it will appear in my texture tab and I'll be able to choose my textures over here so I'll do that now I'll press new that's great as a new texture called texture and you can see here we run the brush texture so I know I'm on the right one and when I open my brushes here with open and go to my brush folder and let's choose a brush and I'll choose this sort of rocky texture here and press open image you can see that this texture is now on my brush that's great so if I start painting now you can see that detail coming through but there's a couple of problems one it doesn't look very good and that's kind of to do with the brush to start with let's look at this texture in a bit more detail so this is not a bad brush for any particular reason but it has very sort of minor details so this is kind of a fine detail brush this one on the other hand is a rock brush and it has much smoother details so you have to consider what type of brush you're using and how it's going to look on your model you'll get used to these as you go along but do understand the more white you have and the more blur you have to it the bigger you can make those details these sort of minut details where you've got tiny spots of white are going to be a bit finer that's not the only problem I have though if I click once it does a reasonable job it's not great but you'll notice if I draw it creates quite a bobbly effect so I'm going to undo those strokes and change some of the settings to this brush first of all let's start with the strength I think it's a bit too strong at the moment because this is very fine detail so let's bring that back down just a touch and let's see what that looks like that's probably a bit better for this sort of brush the next is how it's appearing on my object so let's look at the texture mapping options at the moment it's got view plane ticks so if I draw on the edge here I'll make my brush a bit bigger in fact drew on the edge here you can see that it's stretches across so that means wherever my view plane is that's where it's projecting outwards from we need to change that to what's called area plane that takes the normals of the object so where the faces are pointing into account so what I'm going to do at the top I need to make sure that under my texture area area plane is selected there that's just under the radius and strength and things and down here under the texture as well I need area plane also I'm not sure why we need to do it twice there's probably some clever blender person out there who can tell me that but now if I click you can see there's no stretching it's taking into account the faces of this object which is what we want I'll undo those strokes as well I'm also just quickly going to turn off symmetry because I don't need it on both sides of my object there's symmetry locked down there and I just turned off the x-axis okay so it's working to a degree but we've still got this dreadful sort of blob enos when I pull it across so I'll undo that and we'll try a different texture for the next one so to add multiple textures we just go down to the add texture option down here and that's created a new texture and you probably saw it change up here as well so I've now created a new texture at the moment they're both the same but as soon as I change it here and press the open sign here and select a new one let's select the one I was talking about the rock brush down the bottom here which I think was this one and try that out let's poke my brush a bit bigger with F and that looks nice as long as I'm clicking just the once but it's always pointing in the same direction so let's undo those strikes and I still have this problem that when I'm drawing it doesn't look as bad as the other one but it's still creating a very uniform stroke which doesn't look great I'm going to put the strength of this one up really slightly let's see what that looks like and hopefully you can see from this the quality of this sort of brush as opposed to the last one let's look at the last one this is very fine detail whereas this one is a bit nicer for a rock brush anyway so this one has to be on a very low strength for it to work whereas this one still keeps its shape and structure even on a high strength it tends to be the more smoother transitions between your whites and blacks so the sort of gray levels and in a sense a more blurred image will do a much better job I'll illustrate that point quickly again by adding a new texture here and changing my texture over here to one that's got very sort of crisper details this rock for example as opposed to the ones I'm using at the moment I'll open that up so this as opposed to the other one has got very crisp details and let's try it out and you can see it gives sort of crisper results so there's a much starker contrast in this one as opposed to this one and they tend to be the better brushes for bigger details ones with a bit more blur to them so if I were to take this brush and blur it in something like Photoshop I'd probably get a better image like this one anyway let's undo some of these strokes and let's go back to my good texture brushes I'm gonna call it right so at the moment it's always following the same angle it's all undo those two and I've got a random option here which is quite handy so let's take that and now it's coming out random it's stretched there because for some reason my area plane got turned off so let's turn that back on again and we'll undo those strokes and random now when I add objects they're adding in a random way now when i zoom out my brush changes size so I can zoom in and out and how's different sizes but what if I had an object that I wanted to stay the same size however far out or zoom then I was well let's try a different brush again so I've clicked on new brush down here going over to my new brush and opening up something that needs to be the same size all the time and that's something like a button so I'll open that up see what it looks like not looking too bad I'll make my brush a bit smaller but I'm having this problem that when i zoom in and out I'm getting different size buttons so let's undo that there's also another issue with this button which I'll sort out in a second what I need to do for the radius is lock the radius up here so there's this little lock icon that I can click on now when I create my button it's always the same size no matter where I am zoomed in or out so I'll undo those and let's take a closer look at this button there's something going wrong here one it's not particularly high detail but that's to do with this subdivisions I have and for this example you ever undo that and up the resolution once more so I'm going to subdivide once more this where my computer will struggle a touch so we've jumped up to 25 million faces and the detail is a bit better but I'm still getting this problem at the edges it doesn't look much like the button that's on here now the reason for that is I go back to my tools which is the brushes if I go down a bit lower I'm going to hide the texture tab and go into the curve now when you look at the curve you have to understand it in terms of opacity so this is not visible at all down here and fully visible here a hundred percent opaque and then zero percent opaque and it slowly slides up hence we've got this slow transition where it goes into nothing I like to look at this as the side of a brush so you get lots of ink here or paint here and hardly any on the edges so for things like a button I need to change it to this curve here which isn't really a curve it's just a straight line but now when I click you can see that it comes out completely solid so my curve is actually going right across the top here and therefore the whole of the brush is coming out so when you have textures like this for hard surface modeling it's best to use a brush where they go right to the edge I'll choose one more with my new by pressing new here then going over to open image and let's use Jonathan's sci-fi Alpha Pack one of these for example and click on my object to create this interesting looking shape because I've got my brush all solid it's all coming out if I change this to the default which is over here it's got the slow transition into no percent opacity and if I click now you can see it slowly drifts away and you can change brushes quite interestingly like this so you can get some adaptations to your brushes okay let's undo that I'm going to quickly turn the subdivision down because my computer's struggling too much if you need to turn the subdivision down you can also delete higher which will delete all the detail at the higher resolution which may help my computer run a bit faster over 20 million faces was just a bit too much whilst recording as well so back to my brushes now with these hard surface textures you might want a nice long line of them evenly spaced out well we can do that if I minimize the texture and the curve under the stroke section so at the moment it's under space and if I draw in a line that's the space between my images so I'll undo that and if I turn the space down to 5 you can see the distance is slightly tighter but if I turn this up to 50 and draw a line you can start to see where I'm going with this hopefully I'm going to undo that I'll turn the strength down a touch also it's worth pointing out that you have pen pressure on the end here I'm actually doing this with a mouse at the moment so I can turn that off but if you want different heights when you push down on your pen then you'll need that pressed so let's turn the spacing up to 80 and draw a line that looks good I'm going to bring my radius down a touch and instead of space I'm going to change it to line that way I can draw a line and get buttons coming out I need to turn my spacing up just a touch to something like 90 and draw a line again because it's going around a curve the distance between the spacing isn't quite right but that should be fine on a flatter surface so that can be useful for drawing a line of different objects so under the stroke method as well we have something called anchored now this is quite an interesting one when it come - things like rocks so I'll go back to my rock texture and if I try now you can see that I pull it out and it creates a rock shape and I can change the size of this rock quite nicely so pulling it out like this looks fantastic and that's using the anchored method under the stroke so think there's quite a lot of detail there for you to be trying out the last thing I'm going to show you is how I can save these textures so at the moment if I press save and then come back into this file I'll only see the one that I've got selected which is this one here in order to make all of them available when I come back into my saved file I need to click on this little icon down here save this data block even if it has no users so click on that go to each of them and make sure that's selected and go to file save so now if I quit this and reopen it and go back to my brush I've got all my textures available okay so that was a fairly detailed look at adding alphas in the next episode I'll be talking about how you can create your own remember you can comment with any questions you have or get across to the discord server and you can chat to me there thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 67,918

Keywords: learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, texture, paint, game, material, guide, easy, sculpt, alpha

Id: JJtNfDKHzmo

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018