Modelling scalemail in Blender (using sculpt mode)

greetings Hobbies this is our stands of all in this video we're going to have a look a cool way of making scales or something like scale mail for Fantasy Miniatures so before I do anything else this is not going to be using arrays which is obviously a totally viable way of doing things like scale mail it just gets a little tricky to put them onto an undulating surfaces and things like that and making it look right but it's just whether all that time is going to be particularly worth it for what you do but also bring everything together to one mesh can also be kind of problematic it just takes a lot of time whereas this is going to be a much simpler but still really effective method so first of all I'm going to explain how these tools work because otherwise it's very difficult to see them as you're doing this to make the scales or the scale Mill it's much easier to explain this independently and then create the scales so we'll do that first if you want to skip past that there's times in the description or you can use chapters if you want to to have a look at that so do feel free to skip forward but it's not going to be explained later what I'm doing I'm just going to talk about the keys that I'm using to do it whereas this part will explain it so for this I need a plane I'm just going to subdivide that plane up trying to keep everything as Square as possible making sure I apply the scale and then I'm going to use a multi-resolution modifier so that I've got that to a finer level of detail once we've got that sorted tab into sculpt mode and if you don't have that because you haven't got machine tools then you can always just come up here and go to sculpt mode that way and we've got our tools on the side here but we're not actually going to really use those tools we're going to use one that's a little bit hidden but it's to do with masking and to do that all you do is you hold your mouse over a part of the mesh and we're going to do what is called an expand mask and the way this works is you hold your mouse over your mesh while in sculpt mode press shift and a and that's going to start making this mask and you'll notice it moves out in a circular fashion but you can change this by pressing the numbers so that is the one key the two key is this more Diamond patternal sort of square pattern rotated 45 degrees so you can play around with those now if we start doing that again there's some information on the bottom of what you can do with this but not all of this is shown especially ones that are going to be the most important for this and that one is that you can create a repeating pattern if you press the W or Q keys so I'm going to press the W key I apologize this can't come up on screencast keys because of the way screencast Keys seem to work in blender which is annoying because that's me pressing W and if I keep pressing W that's going to make them go smaller so basically you get a smaller repetition whereas if you press Q you're going to go the opposite way and make them larger so you can do that as you want and then you pull in and out with your mouse to change how much of that is going to be masked and if you ever go past the next line it starts again from that line so that's going to be really useful for this the other thing that we're going to use is the gradient toggle so if I press G you can see what that's doing is now creating a gradient where from each of those repetitions it's got more of the Mask that's the darker color and as you go towards the edge it's got less of the mask and again this is going to be really important and then you click to confirm what you want so this is the tool that we're going to be using to make this work so I'm just going to undo that so what you need to do is you need to start in one of your Far Corners and if you see the middle of your cursor does slightly snap to each of the individual vertices that are there so I'm going to go to the furthest corner just there and I'm going to press shift and a and drag out and you'll see we can't see anything here I don't know why that seems to happen for mine but as soon as I hit two or one we've got our different options here now we're going to use the two now originally this was a diamond shape which we don't want it as a diamond shape we're just using it because it has this sort of 45 degree angle now what I'm going to do is zoom out a bit so you can see more what's going on and I'm going to start that again so go to the corner shift a drag out and then press two and that will create this pattern then I'm going to press W to get a repetition of that and I'm going to keep pressing W until I get it as fine as I want remembering that we're going to go basically all the way to that edge so that would be the size at the moment each of these black sections is how wide one of the scales is going to be so I'm going to press W till I get to about let's say there that's probably about good for me now I'm going to press G to bring the gradient make sure my mouse is as close to the next line or the start of the next mask as possible if you go past it it's going to start again so get it as close as you can and then click and that's confirmed that mask now we need to do exactly the same on the other side so go to the furthest Corner possible shift a drag out two press W and then try to get it so that your sections are about the same size so for example here that's looking about good there I think we can change this later as well so I'm going to press G to put the gradient and then I can still press W if I want to make that a bit less or Q and I think about there is right so that's what I want and then I'm going to click once more and we've got this masked off and you can already see how this is going to work we've got these areas which are lighter and that's going to come further out the areas that are darker are going to remain where they are and once you've got that all you need to do is go to your mesh filter make sure your type is set to inflate and then all we're going to do is click and drag and you can see we've made our scanner now I do note that each time I drag across you can see this going really pixelated and then converting back that's because that's the multi-resolution modifier that's how this would look without the multi-resolution modifier that's with the multi-resolution modifiers so you can see what that's doing if I undo that if I want it a bit further I could always drag out a bit further so there we go a really really quick way of making these diamond pattern scales which I think looks awesome really nice and fantasy now there is a limitation to this we can't really use this to make these small rounded scales so do be aware there are limitations to this but what's really nice about this is that if we put this on a curved surface we will still get a really good result so let's show you how this works in a real example so I've brought in this model by the stormy it's on thingiverse for free I'll put a link in the description and it's pretty cool but let's say I want to add to this let's say I don't want this sort of six pack showing I want to put some scale email there as if this is all fully armored though I think realistically you wouldn't have scale mail with some plate mail over it but you get the idea and this will be a curved surface to be able to look at so all I'm going to do is bring in my plane again oh and why and then 90. that's G and Z that up to get it into place and we're just gonna approximately get that into the correct location let's s to scale that up to probably about there is what we're going to need but not as much on the z-axis so let's go to about there then control and a apply the scale go into Edge mode control and R to make something that's closer to a square so something about there in fact actually that doesn't work that well let's try there and then there that's better as a square again this is not essential but it does make everything work a little bit better then I'm going to a Ctrl and E to subdivide this and we're gonna probably want something about there at this point then I'm going to try and bring this or get this to the point where it's to shape so I'm going to select that edge there I'm going to make sure my proportional editing is on G and x that out so I've got something to about there let's bring that one in so G and X there and then we can start worrying about these edges so there and there and then G and x and take those in and I can control how much this is proportional editing with my mouse wheel so I want something about there that looks about right I just think that edge there is gonna need to go in a little bit more so let's G and X matte to about there okay so we've got an approximate shape it's not perfect but the important thing is here is that this is curved and we've tried to keep everything relatively Square in fact I'm going to put an extra Edge Loop there and an extra Edge Loop there so it's still relatively Square now at this point we have a problem because I want to use my multi-resolution modifier but if I use my multi-resolution modifier and use Simple it is going to keep everything very very squared off so I don't want that I want this to be more smooth to begin with so we're just going to use a simple trick that we'd normally use as well for other sub D workflow remembering multi-resolution modifiers are a bit like adding sub D but it's on top of the low poly mesh so all I'm going to do is go into Edge mode shift and ALT select all of the outside edges shift an e to crease that and now when I add my multi-resolution modifier I can just use the normal subdivide and that's going to look really smooth without getting rid of the pointed tips to each of the corners so you've got that there now let's add in the scales so tab sculpt mode go to the corner shift an A and drag two to get that in we want W to sort out the size of our scales G so we can see the gradient and I'm going to go to about there I think we want these decent size so let's go to about there drag my mouse so that the gradient is as far as possible close to the next Edge click and then we're going to do the same thing on the opposite corner so shift an a drag or notice I wasn't close enough to the corner there you can see that because we've got this horrible section there so let's undo that and actually I wasn't perfect on that one either so shift and a drag to W let's drag that back into about there G and then let's one more thing that's no there's about right and then click as close to the line as possible so there we go we've got our mask gradients let's come out of isolation mode and we can see where that's going to be yes that's about the right size that we want we've got our inflate brush on so all I need to do is Click drag forward to there and we've got our scale Mill so a really nice quick technique to get scale mail on curved surfaces you can see here I've gone slightly off this bit sticking too far out so let's go into vertex mode and grab that G and then y that back let's turn on proportional editing to about there back into object mode and it's moved the scales with it because of our multi-resolution modifier that's why we like a multi-resolution modifier so hopefully you'll find that process useful if you did or you just found it interesting hit that like button subscribe if you're not subscribed and if you want to support the channel further we do have a patreon page where I'll put this file up so you can have a look at it if you want to and once again all credits in the stormy for this sculpt that I've added this to have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 6,079

Keywords: scale, mail, armour, fantasy, sculpting, mesh, mask, extend, inflate, curve, beginner, pro, guide, how to, walkthrough, tutorial, walk, through

Id: dkmCWCBI1CI

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023