SCULPT - Blender 2.80 Fundamentals

in this video I'll go over the fundamentals of blender scope mode I'll try to keep this video as short as possible and only talk about the essential scope mode related to features a lot more can be found and looked up further on the blender manual if you might have any questions on how a setting in the interface works you can always right-click on anything in the interface and click on online manual or hover over it with the mouse and press f1 this will take you directly to the official documentation of any particular feature in the interface these fundamentals I will be talking about might not seem like much but don't mistake that for lacking depth for the sculpting workflow most other features modes and editors are kind of feeding into the possibilities of blender as a sculpting tool there will also be features that I will be intentionally leaving out to not make this video too bloated or complex also before we start I can highly recommend you to get a pen tablet to really get the most out of sculpting drawing and painting and blender there are many settings that relate to pressure sensitivity and sculpting with a pen is generally faster easier more comfortable and ergonomic for your hands it doesn't need to be a very expensive pen display there are many affordable options for tablets on the market so if you're not familiar at all with sculpting in digital software then look at it more like traditional sculpting with clay instead of modifying the geometry of your object in edit mode you are dynamically adding removing and moving around the shapes of your object to affect your surfaces and volumes more freely and dynamically to enter sculpt mode and blender you can switch the mode in the top left corner of the 3d viewport or use the PI menu with the shortcut control tab this will change the options in the interface and replace your cursor with a brush circle the way you interact with your object in sculpt mode is generally to left-click on the surface of your object by default here using the draw brush any vertices within the brush radius are then pushed outwards holding control while doing this will result in the opposite effect in this case pushing the affected vertices in wards when holding shift it will smooth the affected vertices press F to change the scale of your brush and left-click to apply the change also press shift F to change the strength of your brush all these settings can be seen and changed in the tool settings in the top bar and the sidebar of your 3d viewport if you cannot see these areas of the interface the way to toggle them is by using the shortcut T for the toolbar n for the sidebar and looking into the tab called tool and right mouse button clicking on the header and enabling tool settings to get the top bar it's not called top bar anymore it was at some point during the development of planet 2.8 so the name kind of stuck with me and it's going to stay there for a while you can also toggle these areas while clicking on view and toggling them there there might also be a bit of confusion with the difference between tools and brushes so to explain the terminology a bit more the tools you see in the tool bar each have distinct settings and behaviors if you switch between them you might notice that the options and the top bar and particularly in the brush settings are different a brush in this case is a saved preset for these settings you can change the available brush settings freely at any point and their settings will be saved to the brush you are currently using if you want to reset the brush to the default settings at any point you can do it in brush and clicking on reset brush or alternatively you can also press f3 and search for reset brush you can also create new brushes at any time in the brush settings to delete a brush properly hold shift and click on the X icon after reloading your file the brush should be gone for good but let's actually go through the tools that are at your disposal what they are for and what settings they provide so one thing you might notice is that the tools in the tool bar are color coded so blue generally stands for simple adding and subtracting off volume red is increasing and decreasing contrast in different ways yellow is for grabbing behavior instead of drawing lines on the surface and gray is for tools that are affect the model in different ways like hiding or masking geometry but we'll get into all of these tools in a moment the default and topmost is the draw tool this one is the simplest one out of the blue selection with the main effect of adding and subtracting the direction that the brush pushes the geometry in is based on the average normal direction of all the vertices within your brush radius if you don't know what normals are they are basically the direction that any vertex edge or face is facing towards to have them visualize you can enable the normal overlays in edit mode the shortcut for the draw tool is X next two tools in the list are clay and clay strips which are very similar just like draw they add and subtract but have a secondary effect of flattening the affected surfaces this makes these brushes great for building shapes and forms early on while sculpting since they can easily replace previous strokes by flattening them out while you add and remove more volume the difference between the two is that clay strips uses a square sharper profile while clay is very circular and smooth instead clay strips is generally great as a more aggressive and rougher version of the two to build volumes and shapes the clay tool has the shortcut C while the clay strips brush has no shortcut by default the layer tool is also for adding and subtracting but has the extra settings to define a maximum height this way you can more precisely add strokes that won't exceed a certain height and even make the Heights persistent for multiple strokes after one another this one shortcut is El the inflate tool is the most unique out of the blue ones it adds and subtracts based on individual vertex normals instead of the average of everything that is in your brush radius this makes the affected areas essentially inflate and D or deflate which can be great when sculpting thin and small objects the shortcut for this tool is I blob and crease are very similar to each other as well in addition to adding and subtracting they have the secondary effect of pinching or magnifying so essentially pulling the vertices together or apart this effect can be made stronger or weaker in the brush settings by changing the pinch slider with all these tools it's good to keep in mind that the main effect like adding and subtracting can be inverted by holding ctrl but the secondary effects in the brush settings like pinching and flattening cannot be inverted crease has the short cut off shift see all blob has none by default the first of the red tools is smooth this one is very straightforward since it has almost no brush options it's smooth the affected vertices by averaging their position to each other keep in mind that this also results in loss of volume not just surface detail the common way of smoothing is holding shift but the tool also has the shortcut s after that comes flatten fill and scrape which are also similar to each other while the flattening is a secondary effect for the clay brushes in these particular tools it's the main effect what these tools basically do is to push vertices within the brush radius up or down to meet each other in the middle on an average height the fill and scrape tools are similar but only do this in one direction so the scrape brush is always pushing the vertices down while the fill brush is always pushing them up these brushes can be a more aggressive way of smoothing large sections of your surfaces or flattening areas completely while holding control they will do the opposite though and essentially enhance the contrast of your surfaces by pushing away from the average height you can also change the plane offset slider in the brush settings to define the average height where these vertices meet so instead of meeting at the middle they can be pushed further up or down to meet somewhere else flattening has the shortcut of shift T while scrape and fill have none by default pinch is also very familiar instead of only existing as a secondary effect for the crease and bla brushes it also has its own tool so by default it will pull in or pinch your vertices and I'm holding control it will push them apart or magnify this tool is using the shortcut P next in the list are the yellow tools starting with grab with this one you can move vertices within your radius round by making them follow your mouse holding ctrl while doing this will not invert the effect with these brushes but change the direction to be consistent with the average normal direction instead of following the mouse across the screen this effect is called normal weight and can also be adjusted as a slider in the brush settings the shortcut for the grab tool is G by default snake hook is also very familiar to grab the behavior is different and interesting ways though instead of only moving the vertices that are within your brush at the start of your stroke it lets them go and picks up more along the way this gives it an almost liquid-like feeling with this brush you can also basically pull out snakes from your object hence the name the two most important options for this tool are rake and pinch in the brush settings when increasing rake the geometry will follow the rotation of your brush stroke while increasing pinch will avoid the loss of volume during that stroke the shortcut for this tool is shift K by default the thumb and nut tools are each very similar to grab and snake hook they behave exactly like them but instead of moving the vertices around based on the direction that you're looking at the mesh it moves them based on the average normals this way you can slide vertices along the surface of your object instead of along the screen the last of the red tools is rotate this one essentially twists the affected vertices based on how long your stroke is and the angle that you take it's a bit of an odd brush but it could be useful at times the great tools at the bottom are pretty simple actually we'll start with masks and skip simplify for now until we talk about later settings what this brush allows you to do is to place a mask on your geometry indicated by a dark color this mask will not be affected by any other brush a mask with the strength of one is shilling the affected areas from any changes while a mask of half the strength makes the other brushes affect the surfaces only have a strong this brush can be incredibly helpful for many things like sculpting overlapping areas or custom patterns you can hold control to unmask areas and hold shift to smooth the mask you can adjust how dark the mask appears in the overlays with the mask slider you can even toggle the mask overlay off to make the mask temporarily invisible this can also be toggled with a shortcut ctrl M you can invert your mask with ctrl I and remove it completely with all dem very similar to the mask tool is the Box mask if you click and hold on the tool it will actually reveal the lasso mask tool as well these are very similar to the regular box and lasso select an object and edit mode at the moment they unfortunately have no additional options but they're surely coming for the next blender release you can also access the box masking with a shortcut B and lasso masking with holding down ctrl shift and left mouse click it's important to know these types of masking are infinitely deep so box masking will also select through your surfaces and effect the other side of your model the last great tool is barks hiding which can be a quick way of hiding geometry in scope mode hiding geometry is not just invisible but also unaffected by tools any geometry that is hidden in edit mode is also a hidden in scope mode the last tool in the list is annotate to draw annotations just like in any other mode to get a bit deeper into the tools I will also explain the most common brush settings this will not be an extensive overview so again I can recommend to visit the blender manual if you have any questions in the right mouse button menu or pressing f1 or hovering over any setting all these tool settings can be found in the top bar and the sidebar as well as the tool settings tab and the properties editor to the right some of the ones that are the most exposed are radius and strength and they are part of basically every brush and sculpt mode for the most part you will be changing these via the shortcut F and shift F light like mentioned before but the sliders can give you an overview on what they are currently set to you can also enable the button next to them to enable pressure sensitivity this will adjust the setting based on how much pressure you apply with your pen on the tablet the setting is not relevant for Mouse users though the next most used settings are the ones that are tied to holding control namely the direction of your brush or the plus and minus in the tool settings like I mentioned before this is to invert the main effect of your brush holding control with grab snake hook nudge and thumb though instead inverts the normal weight you also have more advanced settings in the brush drop down here you can adjust the behavior of your brush in well detailed ways a very common brush setting for almost every brush is auto smooth which adds a secondary smoothing effect for your brush stroke you can enable pressure sensitivity on a lot of these settings as well for example enabling pressure sensitivity on both the strength and auto smooth as the effect of applying more pressure to add or subtract volume and applying less pressure to get more of a smoothing effects more examples for brush settings are settings like pinch rake and offset which we mentioned before another very common one is accumulate which removes the strength cap of your brush and lets you infinitely apply the stroke on your surface you can also apply textures to your brushes this allows you to use patterns for your brushes instead of just the usual circular fall-off for this you can click on new and or select an existing texture from the texture list new textures are blank by default so to load an image to your texture you need to go to the texture tab in the properties editor and select create or open a new image from the file browser once an image is selected you can rename the texture for organisation's sake for textures you have a variety of options in the tool settings you can for example change the mapping which will change the way the texture is being projected through your brush you can also change the angle of your texture or enable rake to make it follow the rotation of your stroke just like with a snake hook brush the offset and size protects us also freely adjustable belong for your stroke you can also change the behavior the default stroke method is often space which applies the brush strength every time after a certain distance in your stroke increase the spacing and you will get dots that are further apart and decrease it to get a very smooth but also very strong stroke smooth stroke is also often used and has the shortcut Shift s to toggle it the effect this has on the brush is like dragging a paintbrush along a rubber bands you can change the radius and factor to make the stroke more or less smooth the fall-off curve settings are relatively simple you're sculpting stroke always has a profile by default it's using a smooth curve that you can see in these settings or by pressing F or shift F you can either manually change the curve to be sharper or rounder by adding and moving points or even make a completely custom profile points on the curve are added and moved by left-clicking and you can remove them easily by dragging them to the endpoints of the curve you can also just select a preset which will give you the most optimal results with the display options you can change the look of your brush but not much functionality wise and then further down in the tool settings we finally get to symmetry these options that you mirror or duplicate your stroke on your object while you sculpt the most basic ways to use symmetry is to toggle XY and/or z mirror to mirror your stroke across a certain axis these symmetry options will use the origin of the object and its rotation as the center axis of where to mirror your strokes from you can also lock and tie your stroke and certain axes even radial symmetry is available to repeat strokes multiple times around your objects unfortunately there is no dynamic preview of these points where it's going to be merged or duplicate it but this is a feature that is coming for the next version of blender lastly it's time to talk about adaptive sculpting methods you could of course just sculpt on your subdivided cube but there are better ways of providing you with more resolution to sculpt on one of them is dynamic topology or Dyne topo in short you can find it towards the end of your tool settings usually when enabled your sculpting brushes will dynamically tessellate your surfaces to add or remove detail this way you don't really have to worry about running out of geometry to sculpt on because it will always Auto generate it for you you can enable dynamic topology with a shortcut control D you might get a warning message when trying to enable dynamic topology letting you know that it will not preserve some object data like you v's vertex groups and vertex colors since it constantly Ramesh's your geometry this will delete any of this data that you might have so keep that in mind dynamic topology will also not preview any modify as you might have active within the dynamic topology options you can then change a couple of settings and are presented with more options one of them is the method of rematching that is being used you can set it to constant detail which has a set constant detail level that every new triangle is using this way the resolution will remain consistent across the object you can change the resolution value manually or pick a resolution from the 3d viewport with the picker icon the higher the value the more dense the geometry if you change the method to relative detail on the other hand it will base the resolution on how far you zoomed in to your model the resolution gets renamed to detail size and now it relates to the screen size of the triangles set the number to a low amount of pixels for denser geometry the other two methods are used less but what they do is simple brush detail ties the resolution to the brush size and how far you zoomed into your model and manual detail on the other hand it doesn't dynamically remesh by using the brushes which leads me to the extra options below when using constant or manual detail you can flood fill the set resolution to your entire object this is the only way to remesh when using manual detail but also very useful at times when you use in constant detail you can also symmetrize the object by re meshing 1/2 to copy the other half of your geometry just set a symmetry axis and click the button to make your model perfectly symmetrical the optimize button optimizes the performance of your viewport should it become particularly slow almost all brushes are using dynamic topology but the simplified tool is the one that exclusively reacts to it there's also another way of adding more geometry to your object apart from dynamic topology and that is multi-resolution this is a modifier that can be added in the modifier tab and the properties editor this adds an interface to add subdivisions to your object while being able to sculpt on the individual levels you can set different levels of your subdivisions to be visible in your viewport preview in general sculpt mode specifically and during rendering I can recommend to always leave it at CAD Mellark since simple just adds more geometry without smoothing the results and those are the basics the rest can be found in the online manual for blender

Channel: Blender

Views: 207,097

Keywords: blender, b3d, blender 3d, 2.8, 2.80, blender 2.8, blender foundation, sculpting, character creation, tutorial, training

Id: TAGWu08oWAM

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019