Introduction to Blender's Cloth Brushes (Couch Part 3)

cult brushes are an exciting new feature and innovation really in blender 2.83 it enables you to perform a localized cloth simulation where your brushes which is handy because it enables you to sort of push and pull and move around the cloth kind of like with your hands in a way so we're gonna be using it on our couch cushion to add variation detail and more specifically add variation between the cushions because we have to duplicate this twice so there's gonna be three of them side by side very noticeable if they all looking identical by the way I apologize for this highly frustrating light that's right here don't normally record in the morning and there's a blind that has just crackle light so I'm just gonna be looking all weird for this this video just gonna have to deal with it before we get to before we get to the couch cushion I thought I would take a second to demonstrate it just on a plane so I'm just gonna add in a plane here and I'm just gonna subdivide it because we're gonna talk about the brushes what all the brushes do how to use them etc because it is a kind of a new concept and chances are most you watching this have never used cloth brushes before so let's get into it if you go to the sculpting tab that'll put you into sculpt mode and then the brush that you are looking for is right down here looks like cloth and that's the cloth brush so if you were to just click and drag you know over a mesh it would kind of do like stuttery thing and that's because by default it's got mirror turned on so it's performing the simulation twice it's it's a weird it shouldn't work with similar symmetry turned on but anyways once you do that you should be able to move it around pretty pretty freely so you can see sort of what it's doing it's as you sort of push it in one direction it's kind of forming ripples as you push it the other it's kind of like you're sliding your hand across the fabric now if you pull up the side bar with n the properties go to tool then this will give you the actual tool properties so the whilst there is one cloth brush there is actually really this many types of cloth brush so the default one is drag but there is push as well so push basically performs a push as in like straight directly down into the mesh and then it creates wrinkles where there would be wrinkles and that's very similar to the inflate brush the inflate brush by default goes in the other direction but you can invert any brush by holding down control and you can see that the the push and the inflate brush behave very similarly but I guess the inflate brush like once you've pulled it out to here it'll also start pushing the bits that are out like outwards a little bit so I guess that's the difference between an inflate and a push then you also have the next one pinch point so this one will essentially pinch wherever your your mouse is if it will actually do anything all right there we go this one is honestly pretty hard to control I don't really particularly like the pinch brush to be honest it just seems to form creases in sort of various directions you've also got a pinch perpendicular which creates it sort of like your brush basically has to be moving basically and then in the direction that your brush isn't moving perpendicular to that it will sort of push them together that's my understanding of the pinch perpendicular and then the last two brushes grab and expand grab is actually really handy and enables you to grab parts of the mesh and and pull it up and it's you know pretty similar to the grab brush in in sculpt like if you hit G the grab brush like it behaves pretty similarly to that but when you push and you move things it will add in creases and things around it where where they would logically I mean this is a terrible example because it's on the plane but it's actually gonna work really well when we get to our couch cushion there and then the final one is the expand brush which evidently won't work if you've got a completely flat plane like this you'll notice nothing is happening what you need to have is some sort of geometry so let's just push but in the opposite direction let's raise it up a little bit and then if we go to expand what expand does is it basically it's like relaxing the fabric right so it's one mean this would be really handy for like a bedsheet for example right if you just want to like relax it and make it look sort of all crinkled in there that looks horrible to be honest because if there's lumpy lumpy mess but it's better when you're not demonstrating it on a flat plane let's just say that okay now thank you toggle it it tracks my time and lets me know how long I have wasted on on other things than work so anyways I'm doing work let's track the time so there is as well as as this there is also the force fall-off okay so there's there's the brushes but then there's also the way in which it does it there's radial and then there's plane plane is essentially it's almost like a rake essentially so it's it's moving a single force in sort of one direction I mean that's a really huge brush let's maybe go a little bit some more there we go okay so it's it's still I mean it's got a radial fall off but it's it's it's almost like it's like a big straight flat arm rather than a hand right it's but again it behaves differently in depending on what it is you are doing for example grab it can behave if you've got the plane I mean that looks horrible yeah it's it's it's working on a plane but anyways most of the time I very very rarely ever use the plane yeah I just find radial tends to work best for whatever weave whatever way to it now the other a couple of other little settings for one the strength by default is like really way too high for what we're gonna do I generally just work with 0.1 so we'll get to that um the other settings you've got normal radius and I don't know what that means I asked the developer what it meant and didn't get a response so and evidently the the manual is still being written so they you know give you the tool and then someone has to figure it out or you just have to wait for the manual so I'll just wait for the manual I don't know I don't know what that means that as the tooltip something that is probably very important to understand is what are these circles mean right you've got two orange circles in the middle where your brush is and then you've got around it you've got two faint gray circles one of them dotted and yeah it took me a while to figure out what it was but essentially the orange circles in midair the middle there are the same as just like if you were sculpting with any brush right if you just take a you know typical brush it's the same two circles the middle circle is the force that's being applied and then I believe the outer circle is the fall-off of that right so it's the exact same thing with with the cough brush the only difference with the cloth brushes that you have those those two larger gray circles around it one of them is dotted and then the other one is a hard one so essentially that is the simulation limit so as I mentioned it's performing a simulation which is local to a specific area so essentially you have two top line de at what point should it stop including parts of the mesh - to include in the simulation essentially right now it's weird because like how would that like if you are dragging across here right like you know why why would that be like the end of a simulate like you can simulate across the entire mesh right like so how does that actually work and yeah it doesn't explain this in the manual I believe but maybe it does so don't know maybe I didn't read it closely enough but anyways essentially when you first start your stroke as and when you first click these circles those gray circles do not move they are locked in there so as I move my my brush around here you'll notice that there becomes like a hard line at the edge there and in fact if you were to move your brush outside of that line you would see those red circles flashing which means that you have gone outside of the bounds of the simulation so if you want to continue it what you need to do is lots of small strokes right in order to simulate outside of that so every time you release the stroke and you move to a new place the simulation fall-off is moved along with it essentially so that's how you end up including you know bigger and bigger parts of it you could of course increase that with this simulation there however of course that will slow down your simulation because it's trying to include more parts of the mesh into it and it might not be needed depending on what you are doing yeah personally I find the COFF brush is for something like a couch cushion I haven't tried it with like characters clothing and things like that but it's not as good as the cloth is simulated it's not designed to replace the cloth simulator for example it doesn't do collisions if you've got a character with clothing on it's not gonna collide with the underlying mesh underneath it doesn't do collisions and as well as that what's the other really big the big downside yeah it doesn't take into account the entire mesh right so what this means is let's let's end this example with the plane here and let's go to our question here what I mean by this is when we when we did the simulation for our couch cushion it treated the mesh like it was the entire mesh was made of fabric right and if you pull if you if one corner of this was to be grabbed and pulled this way it would retain the shape of cloth as in like it can't tear it can't it's not bendy like melted cheese it has to retain it whereas this cloth brush here for example I could go in to grab mode and I could just you know grab part of it like this and you could see right like that this shouldn't exist in anyone's reality or nightmares hich it shouldn't be possible that that cannot happen but it can happen with cloth with the cloth brush so I I personally find that the cloth brush works well for small improvement small adjustment small tweaks if you want to have like a bed sheet or a I'd see I haven't tried with a bed sheet brush probably actually works really well for a bed sheet but if you want to have yeah like a couch cushion if you want to have clothing if you want to have you know severe stretching you you should be using the full cloth simulator because otherwise you're gonna end up with like very quick like I've done this so many times and you end up with something that looks like it's not possible like this here is not possible there's no way for the stretch to be stretched that much without this corner up here also being pulled in that direction right so you can very quickly create something that is impossible for it to work so anyways in our example what what we've done is we've we've we've created the cloth simulator for the cushion great did that we got the basic shape of it now we're gonna be duplicating this right three times or twice and you can see that this looks very repetitive right if this was a you know you saw this in a room and an archivist scene or something like that it's like yeah that couch looks fake right so the cloth brush is going to enable us to add small tweaks and small improvements for small fixes and things which will add variation between these cushions and it's also going to enable us to do a couple of things like it just some seams and make this here look a little bit more bulbous one thing I want to do before we duplicate each of these cushions though is I want to have this interacting with this backboard here because obviously it's not gonna look very good if you know you know it's the cushions are gonna be rotated like so at 10 degrees like that if it was just sort of like intersecting like that or if it was perched like that so because we didn't have cloth collisions we yeah we're gonna fix it right now so basically in sculpt mode there is a brush called the draw sharp brush which when you draw it looks like this turning off the symmetry it looks like this which is pretty perfect for this edge right here so before we draw we want to make sure that we are the cushions are where they need to be essentially so let's just scale up this cushion a little bit and bring it down a little bit because this is where you know the base cushion is gonna be and so this is where our line needs to be so with a draw short brush you know you could draw it like that however you might not be able to draw it very straight so there is a stroke method called line which is going to be exactly what we need so then just pick an area just below where the the the board actually appears and then just draw across it like that and there we go it looks like it's being interacted with which is definitely a lot better okay so now that we've done that duplicate it one each side that is running out of room a little bit on that side it's okay if there's a little bit of intersection because we can fix that with the both brushes using the grab defamation which would be kind of cool um that's pretty good and also I'm gonna make one of these just this middle one here rotate it an extra five degrees to add just a little bit of variation and this one I'll just rotate a little bit along the Zed axes all these little little things will just help it you know not look perfectly aligned but much like the real world Digital perfection is perfect no imperfection is the digital perfection try and remember my own quote there anyways okay so into Scott mode now let's start by adding in with the cloth brush here the inflate tool and we're gonna add in that lumpy that lumpy look right you can see some of them look really taut some of them look kind of lumpy right like it's almost like it's been stuffed with goose feathers or something like you know those like you go to a hotel and the pillow looks kind of like lumpy it's cuz it's got that goose feathers is what I believe it is but anyways we wanted to look lumpy so I'm just gonna do some like little strokes now one thing to note is you'll notice that if you just like hold your brush in one location it doesn't keep adding to it and that is because the stroke method is set to space which means you have to be have moved it a significant amount before it'll actually perform the next bit which is not what I want I want to set it to airbrush so that I can click and hold in one place however it's way too much by default so the strength is point five by default which I think I mentioned is just way too high for pretty much everything we want to do so point one will be a lot better and now that I've done that I should be able to just click and drag around now I'm doing this all with my mouse if you have a tablet I would recommend using it I do have one but I want to show you that it can be done just with a mouse because whilst you definitely need a stylus to sculpt something like a character because it's you know it's it's a lot to do with sculpting skill something like the cloth the cloth sculpt brush it's not as as reliant on your sculpting skills so I want to show you because I know most people that are following this tutorial probably in our covers they want to make furniture and they don't have a need for a stylus and if you saw me using one you'd be like oh well what's the point in following this tutorial it's not needed it's it'll just help a little bit for certain things like this okay so you can see like adding in that lumpiness has helped and the reason we didn't do it before before we duplicated it is that every this uniqueness in the way that we just painted that will help each of these little cushions just to look a little bit different which is really the whole aim you something else you can do by the way is the seams here if we look at reference you'll notice that not that one perhaps that one's a little bit too taut but generally where there is a seam you generally get like different types of different creases and wrinkles like the wrinkles kind of like reset wherever there is a seam right like you get different things um and I'll try to figure out like how can I do that and then I realize like there is a new feature in blended 2.83 the that came yeah with that release and that is called face sets right here and face sets means that you can like click and draw and then you click and draw again and it'll keep drawing different random colors and then each one of these colors becomes a mask now it'll be very time consuming to like draw out this however there is thankfully a way to go face sets by UV seams and now each of our seams here has its own little color there which means I can now use my cloth brush and by default nothing will have changed however in your advanced settings there is something called face sets auto masking which if you enable this this means that when I paint or when I you know perform an operation like drag for example um you can or my daughter I don't know if you can hear her um but it'll only perform it where I started my stroke which in this case is the blue area oh wait yeah that's the other annoying thing about the undo feature in blender I don't know when this happened in like the last release or something but like you'll notice like I turned on face autumn asking and then I do this but then if I hit controls that it removes the stroke but then also the setting that I changed it's so frustrating anyways to show it right okay so so yeah it's only doing it where the color that you started now another thing is there's another face sets down here called face sets boundary and what this means is is that you can draw across multiple colors however look at that it'll actually retain where basically where it where it transitions into another color it'll almost treat like this edge this face edge here that's kind of like a hard point and it won't move it so it gives like a boundary edge essentially to it which gives it this receipt control-z again so frustrating it just means that yeah now I now I can draw and create kind of this like puffy cushion look like how cool is that definitely should be out here my daughter now it's when she's not getting enough attention she just like starts amping up her voice and get gets more and more hyped as like look at me witness me anyways the fun of working from home anyways so that's that's something that you can do like depending on the the type of couch the type of cushion and in fact actually our reference probably doesn't even have a line at the top there I think the seam is actually it's on the other side of it but yeah you know where we're adding some creative license to it I like that term creative license because it's um you can use it when you've made a mistake it's a cut it's a really common one actually in like the 2d arts it's like someone will go like oh well your proportions are off the shading yeah you know if you want critiques that that's what I would create it you know the proportions and they go no no no that's my style that's my creative style it's like no no even if you're doing stylized anime you can't have a leg that's like twice as long as it should be and everything else looks normal anyways getting into the weeds there all right so I mean essentially the rest of this is is it's just adding slight variations to it so something else that I want to do is these corners here where they are colliding you might be wondering how we're going to fix that we're just gonna use this grab brush make sure that this is turned off so that you can actually just drag like so and it should actually add an extra wrinkles where that bit has sort of intersected so I can move this out a little bit pull this in so to make it look like it's sort of like leaning against that edge this pot pull that back a little bit so you can see like as you grab it you get these extra wrinkles there which is really cool it's it's kind of the the one like type of defamation in these brushes which is kind of different in that like when you click and you hold it down it doesn't do like this like ripple you know like you can kind of click and do and it'll just add in like static ripples as like static wrinkles as you go which is really cool so yeah right like so and you'll notice that as I'm doing it I'm doing very small operations because as I've mentioned I think a lot you can overdo it very quickly and so yeah it's much better to do small operations see how it looks from afar come back in do some more if needed rather than doing like going crazy with your cloth brush because I know it's fun it's right you know you feel like you're reaching through your monitor and like doing these like wild like I'm moving the fabric man looking at it it's a loosey goosey pillow but then you've just like ruined it right it's so just yeah just just go easy yeah just small little movements to to break up the repetition that's really what this this step is all about I don't think I mentioned the so the drag brush right something I like to do is going off reference you can see that the tops of it has kind of like been pulled down like it's like kind of stretched and kind of taut so you end up with like extra ripples along the top there but when you do that you get these extra wrinkles across here so for that very simple just smooth it out by holding down shift shift by the way is just a way of enabling temporarily enabling the smooth brush it's the exact same thing I'm not sure if I mentioned it but I gave my cloth brush its own shortcut control shift C which you can do just by right-clicking and saying add shortcut I find most of the scope brushes in blender should have shortcuts but they don't like it's there's no reason they shouldn't be because there's a whole bunch of empty keys that aren't doing anything when you're in scope mode so I don't know why like some of them have have hotkeys but then they just didn't bother with the rest of them I don't know maybe it's like everybody wanted to go through the task of what do you guys think of shift T and then there's just like a thread of like 50 pages like well control shift T that kind of confuses me because I use Houdini and I don't think that's a good one they never have like a better solution they just don't like all the other suggestions yeah that's why am i I really tip my hat to Bill Raina Sh William Raina SH who did the whole 2.8 UI revamp because if you're not involved in like you know the really honestly like religious politics that comes with you is it's extremely frustrating any time you decide to do something like I've got to hide this feature because no one uses it and it's just cluttering the interface there would just be like pages of people going like I used this feature every day and it's like not everyone has the latest computer we have to use the legacy tools for the blah blah blah and you know if you didn't change it you would end up with ZBrush right the ZBrush with its Boeing 747 cockpit looking interface just like switches and things and like one of the one of the brushes is dragon bones why to change it just it shouldn't be it shouldn't be that hard to debate that right there are some things that you should just be able to say you know the one guy in the world that uses that tool know most people don't need it so we're just going to delete it dragon bones the only thing really that is left is I think that's just this repetition on this side like this sides pretty good I think these all look pretty different so really if I just change this middle one that should be enough because I don't think you'll notice that too there so yeah so I'm just gonna go and just do one last little if I can find the thing grab no I'll drag drag and grab sound very similar and do completely different things but that's alright you know it's a cool tool its innovative I think I think I don't know if any other software has the cloth brush tool as far as I know blender is the first I could be wrong I could be wrong but it's it seems to be it seems to be original which is cool it's nice when blender seems to be so leading the industry in some some places but anyways I don't like this area here I'm just gonna smooth this with a bit of an inflate bit of inflation a little bit there yeah that should do it I reckon so that's kind of like a lumpy bit yeah I like to do that when it's when you've got an area that just doesn't look right you're like I don't know it's like I'll just make it lumpy make it taut and yeah and it's usually pretty fine then this in but as you can see this method is it's you know it's designed to keep the original shape of the cloths in that we got and then tweak it to our own creative direction but also to add variation across it so that's it guys that's it for for these obviously we're gonna have a subsurf modifier on top of it which you can enable like that by the way just FYI if you go into scott mode you notice that you can't see face your face sets so if you ever can't see your face setting you're like why can't i see my face sets it's because it won't work with a modifier on i believe any modifier but maybe it's just some stuff i don't know if that's a bug but evidently that's that's something to keep in mind but there you go so the next part of this tutorial is going to be sort of a sped up version of these these extra little cushions here so there's a side arm cushion these flat cushions here and it's just going to be sort of speeding through that process and then doing the cloth brushes on top of it but it's the same as what we have done here so go ahead click here and I will see you in that part thank you for watching

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 261,874

Keywords: blender, tutorial, cloth brush, cloth sculpting, blender cloth sculpting, couch sculpting, couch tutorial

Id: HlrgFS8AMMU

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020