Sculpting in Blender 2.8 | Beginners Detailed Guide | Every Brush

hello and welcome to gavotte media I'm grant Abbott and this is a QuickStart guide to sculpting in blender 2.8 so when you first come into blender you will see a screen like this and you can actually click on the sculpting option there and I'll take you straight into sculpting mode with a heavily subdivided ball if I go into wireframe mode I'll quickly show you that it's got lots of subdivisions back to solid mode and you can start sculpting on this by left clicking on the surface however you may start the more traditional way so if I go file new and just go to the general that's what most people see especially if you click off the splash screen so you can get to sculpt mode by going into sculpt mode there now what you'll find instantly if you try and sculpt this it does sculpt but nothing is really happening that's because we haven't got enough vertices in order to desculpe t' so if I go into wireframe mode now with Zed on my keyboard you can see that there's only a few vertices for me to pull around so when I start sculpting it moves those around but it's not adding any vertices so let's go back into object mode with Zed z for Americans I've also just turned on my shortcut keys you'll see them down in the corner there so we've got this problem that it's not adding any topology so when we sculpt it doesn't look like much is happening now there's a couple of ways to deal with this the first one is to start with a mesh that's got lots of subdivisions so I'm going back to the layout mode and undo any sculpting that I've just done so I'm back to the beginning the easy way to add subdivisions is press ctrl v on your default cube and that adds a subdivision surface modifier under the modifiers tab just here I can then apply that modifier and that means I'll have lots of subdivisions if I go into edit mode now you can see I'm into edit mode with tab on my keyboard I've got lots of subdivisions there which I can use and that's pretty much how you start and I believe this is a similar amount of subdivisions as if you started straightaway in scope mode so that's how you get to that position so back into object mode with tab on my keyboard so you've got object mode and edit my up here you've also got skull bone up here but they've got a nice workspace for sculpting so if I click on the sculpting workspace you can see it removes my timeline from the bottom and it gives me the brushes so I'm on my tool section already with my brush and options for sculpting down here which ever mode you're in up here you've always got the modes options or the tools for that mode or active tool and workspace settings just at the top here so I can start sculpting on this and now I'm getting some detail but it's still not much and you can still see all the vertices so the more I sculpt they're more stretched out those vertices get and you can see they're particularly bad up here what you will also notice is that I've got symmetry turned on automatically so first let's deal with the symmetry we've got a symmetry option down here and I can tick X and now I can sculpt just on one side now if you're doing a face you will want to keep symmetry on so you should be quite happy with X symmetry at any time I can tick this again and it will starts immature izing but obviously if I've done some work on one side and then I reapply the symmetry it doesn't mirror across that work on to the other side that I did when I didn't have symmetry selected hopefully that makes sense so undo my strokes there and I'll keep symmetry on for the moment the other problem is the mesh stretching before I go into that I'll just tell you that there's lots of different brushes down the side here the main one that I'm using at the moment is the draw brush so that's just drawing onto the object when I left click it takes away from the object or digs into the object if I hold down ctrl and left click for basic navigation we use our middle mouse button to move around our object and you'll want to be doing that a lot when you're sculpting you can also hold down shift and middle mouse button and move left and right like that if you want to zoom in on an area let's say I want to start working on this bit here I can press alt middle mouse button and it then centers my viewport around that object and I can zoom into it so alt middle-click or sent to your viewport around that area that's very very useful so we've got this stretching problem so I paint and it's stretches so again what's happening if I go into wireframe mode with said on my keyboard you can see that the vertices are just being pulled out back to solid mode what blender has is an option called dine topo so if I just click on the disclosure arrow and select on topo I'll come up with warning basically just don't worry about that and click OK and now I've got dine topo selected this is dynamic topology so when I start painting on this now you can see that I keep clicking and brushing and the same amount of topology is being created and it's new topology it's not stretching like it is up here it's new topology so that's what Don topo does it adds new topology when you sculpt which is very clever so you don't get any stretching mesh like you do up here if I paint on this now it suddenly creates more topology and it will create more mesh as I paint now there's a few options here I think the easiest to understand is constant detail so detailing I would choose constant detail especially for beginners relative detail means that when i zoom in like I am now the topology will be more detailed and when i zoom out like i am now and i'll doing something on the back you can see that it's creating this a bit of a mess because it's very low detailed I'm gonna go in and paint on that and you can see what's going on occasionally in 2.8 you do get these glitches if I go to edit mode with tab on my keyboard and back to scope mode it clears that up generally speaking and that often happens when you reduce the detail of your object and it a low detail level joins to a high detail level like it does here so it's all a bit blobby and messy at the back here I can smooth that out by holding down shift and left clicking and that's the smooth option as you can see there now another important thing to notice that when I come out of scope mode by pressing tab on my keyboard and into edit mode so wanted to clean any glitches up like I just did if I go back into scope mode now with pressing tab which is a shortcut way of going to your previous mode which is scope mode in this case it turns done topo off so you have to click it back on and of course to go past the warning now I can keep painting and adding topology also occasionally when you add a low level of detail it does shift the symmetry can you see it's not quite symmetrized anymore and I'll go into how to tidy that up later but first of all this detail level I feel for beginners is a bit confusing so zooming in adding more detail zooming out adding less can be problematic for beginners especially if i zoom out here and start drawing it's destroyed my level of detail so it's easy to make mistakes so I would rather use constant detail and that keeps a constant detail however far your zoomed in or out so if I start sculpting with this you can see it's still a low level of detail we're only on three at the moment and I can increase that level of detail to something like 10 and that's much better I'm going to get a tiny bit higher than that effect yep to about 11 in this case and I think that's perfect I'll just smooth this out by holding down shift to smooth out the areas and occasionally like I've said before you get these glitches if you go into edit mode and then back into scope mode it removes them but remember to click on your dying topo again so I've got constant detail selected with a resolution of 11 so it's quite low at the moment and I'm able to paint now how about tidying up this symmetry well in constant detail it's quite nice because you've got a remesh option here if I click on that I can Reece immature eyes so symmetrize there so if I just go around to the front of my object like this so that's the front of my object there I can see the x-axis coordinates up here so I know that if I go from minus X which is this side to this side which way I'm CIMMYT rising so minus X to positive x and press symmetrize can you see it tidied up that's there be a bit careful of this so you need to understand your axes in order to get this to work so if I did let's say - said to positive said impress symmetrize you can see that it's taken the middle point of my object which is the object origin or pivot point and I'll show you that by quickly going back to layout and you can see my pivot point in the middle that's probably an easier way just to go to layout mode to show you that and there's my pivot point right in the middle so it back to scope mode it's right in the middle and my said symmetry symmetrized in the z-axis so I'm going to undo that because I really like this sort of weird monster that I've created here and I'm still in dine topper mode at constant detail so I'll quickly take you through the important brushes and for that I'm going to up the detail level now when you're starting sculpting I think it's a good idea to stay at a low detail and only slowly increase the levels as you go but I'm going to take mine up to something like 20 so I've got lots of detail to show you the different brushes and what they do so if I sculpt now you can see it adds about twice the resolution I might go up to thirty actually so I can also type in here you can click and drag these sliders or you can just click once and type in as well so that's a high level of detail and I'll use that the more detail I go the harder it is to smooth things out so if you make any errors it's kind of harder to remove them without destroying your mesh also can you see this funny glitch in here that's on both sides I'm going to tidy that up by painting over it and that adds more topology and has tidied it up so let's go through the brushes first is the draw brush and as a reminder left click to paint control left click to dig in and shift in any brush is smooth shift left click that is the next brush on the list is the clay brush and that does a very similar job it's a brush I rarely use I just rather use the draw brush same controls dig in with control left click and left click draw let's go to the clay strips now this is slightly different I'll just increase my brush size with F will increase your brush size like this give you that control and shift death is the strength of your brush you can also get those options over here radius and strength so if I start painting now with the high strips tool you can see it adds these strips now lots of artists quite like this clay strips brush is it adds quite a lot of topology quite quickly and it kind of comes from traditional sculpting where they added strips of clay like this to their models so the clay strips brush is a very useful one now in order to show the next one I'm going to put in a bit of detail so I'm going to come in here make my brush a bit smaller and I'm going to have to up my resolution a bit more soft but up to 50 this time just smooth that streak out and do another one there we go so I've got a bit more detail coming in here this one is the layer brush so if I click on this I'm going to make my brush fairly big and draw I just don't do that and I'll bring down the strength of touch because I want to show you exactly what it's doing so bring down the strength and I draw can you see how it kept the detail of my model so the detail that was already there so if I undo it's got these lines as detail and I draw over it like this it keeps that detail so it pushes out the mesh so adds more volume but it doesn't destroy the details if I go back and I did that with the draw brush you can see how it's losing the detail because it's kind of smoothing it out as I draw I'll undo those and I go back to my layer brush and draw with that it's keeping that detail is distorting it slightly and it doesn't do a perfect job but it's quite a useful one if you've done lots of detail and then you think I want to pull that out a bit you can use the layer brush so I just quickly smooth that out and can you see because I've got a high level of detail I can't smooth it back to where it was but with these low level details as I smooth it pushes it in quite a lot and that's why it's helpful not to go to higher detail too early on the inflate brush is very similar to things like the draw brush and the clay brush and the clay strips brush it adds topology but it inflates it so it just sort of pushes it out in a sort of ball so let's inflate these ends here and add a bit of smoothing with shift and inflate and can you see how it's sort of making very sort of circular blobby looking things it's very useful brush and you'll see why as you become more experienced but often you'll end up with sort of tiny strands of things and you need to inflate them and pull them out a bit and we've got this very weird blob looking thing now there is actually the blob brush as well similar to the inflate brush but it just creates a blob so if I make my brush smaller with F I start painting there's a blob quite simple brush really if I keep clicking and clicking again and clicking again it sort of pulls out the mesh but if I just click and hold and drag it creates a sort of round ball like a blob like that next is a really important brush it's the crease brush I usually go to this after a sort of first level of detail where I've got my main shape I start using the crease brush like I would if I were drawing lines on a painting so let's say these are going to be eyes and I bring my crease brush in here like this by left-clicking it creates an indentation like this so it actually pulls the topology in to each other very very handy the opposite of course if I hold down control is to pinch it in but pull it out like so often you want to combine this with a bit of smoothing so if I shift and smooth those out and then go over them again it creates a slightly finer line this brush is better with relative detail so you can zoom in and it pulls the topology in in a better way and that's when I would want to use relative detail when using the crease brush to get nice sharp edges next is the smooth brush which we've already talked about but if I click on the smooth brush you can change the strength here so when you press shift it will use that strength that the smooth brush is on so shift is just the shortcut to the smooth brush so if I use the smooth brush now it smooths things out and the strength obviously affects how much it smooths these things out I'm going to put it down to 50% so whenever I press shift that's what it will be at the flattened brush now this is a very useful one for hard surface modeling so if I flatten out this area here you can see what it's done it's literally flattened it out now this is a hard one to control and there's lots of settings in here which I'm not going to go into but I will go into those in future episodes but the flatten brush will just flatten things out with very sort of smooth edges by default next is the fill and this is a bit like the layer brush but it will try and fill things in and flatten them out with whatever's around them so can you see I'm filling in this gap here so there's a gap between these two and I want to sort of fill it somehow if I go to the draw brush I try and draw there and then I have to smooth it out it's quite tricky but with the fill brush I go in there and it somehow works out that it needs to fill the space and it's not moving this edge or this edge like the draw brush was so very clever brush that and it fills areas in next we've got the scrape brush now this is a hard one to explain and it's like scraping down edges that are sticking out so this edge here will be scraped out and it's very similar to the flatten brush and it sort of scrapes things out like you're pushing a knife across the surface of your clay sort of sort of scrapes it backwards an interesting brush and there's some interesting things you can do once you get used to all the tools in there now the pinch brush is very interesting I'll show you it on its own first so if I draw a line down here you can see hardly anything happening but you can just about see in there things happening but not much generally you combine it with something like the crease brush so if I create a crease in here so it's going across and in there and then I use the pinch brush it pulls that crease into itself so it pinches the topology together in fact the crease brush has a pinch option on it so how far it pulls the vertices of this side and this side into the middle here and that's what the pinch brush is doing now there's some great things you can do with this so if I do an edge like this with my crease brush and sticking here it's great for hard surface modeling if I go to the pinch brush now in fact I'm gonna get back to the crease brush and up the resolution that's very high like something around 80 and do a crease along here nice detailed crease now let's just smooth that out a bit crease along here by holding down control and making it stick out like this I'm using my mouse at the moment rather than my tablet so it looks a bit off but if I go to the pinch brush now you can see that refines that edge and sharpens it up and when i zoom out a bit now we've got quite a hard edge and with more detailed especially a detailed resolution brush that would do a better job I'll quickly show you that effect so there's relative detail which we start with by default and if I up the detail which is actually bringing the level down which is a bit confusing but the detail size you bring it down with relative detail it's the opposite to constant detail and can you see that really sharp edge that the pinch brush is making now so that's when hundred go over to relative detail for the brush size I'm going to go back to constant detail now and I still got a very high detail I'm just gonna turn that down to something like fifty for the next lot of brushes so the next one is the grab brush and this is very useful if I make my brush nice and big and let's go to the back here and pull this topology out now the grab brush and the snake hook tool are very similar so they pull topology out and they're really important for when you start doing your initial mesh so I'll just smooth that out with a smooth brush and I'll pull this out into some weird creature that we got here but the important thing is with the grab brush if I make it really big and stretch it right out you can see that it doesn't add any topology so it's kind of turned on top of off for this moment now the alternative to that is the snake hook and when you pull that out it creates new topology can you see this is nice and clean it's lagging a little bit because it's adding quite a lot of detail in here we've got some sort of weird creature now and I'm smoothing that out but can you see how it added this long line I'll bring down my brush size a bit and what create some tentacles out the side here so can you see that's what the snake hook tool does now be careful with this I'll just smooth that out of touch can you see my smoothing out makes it a bit thinner and that's sometimes where you need the inflate brush to inflate ends if you want too common use for the inflate brush so back to the snake at tool be careful with the snake hook so if I bring down the resolution fairly low to something like five and then I start pulling this up can you see how my mesh has gone all distorted and it's become quite a mess and even if I go to edit mode with tab on my keyboard it's still crossing over and that's very problematic so back to scope mode with tab on my keyboard and make sure on top is still on which strange do this this time I'm going to up my resolution and let's try and smooth that out and yes I've managed to fix that which is good I'm just going to go with my draw brush draw over this and can you see the difference between the simple topology and the detailed topology was a problem and now I've gone to a similar level this is I think was 80 or 50 somewhere around that and this is 20 so it's not so far away and now we've got less of those glitches so I just smooth that out with a smooth brush so that's the grab tool which doesn't add topology or faces and then the snake hook tool which does add faces the next three brushes I rarely use but there's the thumb which is sort of needing your mesh like you're using a thumb on some clay it's quite an interesting one that but I haven't found much use for it yet but it sort of pinches it together in certain areas maybe I ought to experiment with it more next one is the nudge and this does a sort of funny nudging job of nudging topology to the side and if I put some detail in here effect let's up the resolution a bit again and I want to nudge something to the side can you see it's trying to push it across but keep the detail it can be quite useful that to be fair let's say I want these gills which they suddenly are to be over in this space over here I can sort of nudge them across it does squeeze things together though and it's an untidy brush then there's the rotate so in fact I'll do some lines again just so you can see these things working they rotate brush make it nice and big and can you see I'm rotating the objects which again they these things rarely use but occasionally they can be really handy now there's the mask brush this is very useful so let's say if I paint with my masculine spring it down a touch paint with my mask anything that's black will not be affected by the brushes I use so I paint in black here and then I go to my draw brush and I paint alongside here can you see it's not affecting the black area which can be quite useful if I want to clear a mask I press alt M so in blender alt is usually sort of like an undo that command tool so alt M undo the mask I'll turn will clear it and then I could come with my pinch brush in here and pinch this edge in and it sharpens it up to a degree anyway so that's the mask brush and it's very good if you've got some really sort of tight areas and you want to work on just one point you can draw a mask let's say in here let's alt middle click to center my viewport around this area and start painting so I'm just going to work on this area so I'm masking it seems strange though masking it looks like I'm not going to work on this area so I just want to work on this area but I've got the mask the wrong way around I can go up to my mask menu up here and press invert mask and now everything else is inverted and I can start sculpting on here as much as I like and alt M to clear your mask there's a few other options which are similar to masking here there's a box mask so you can click and drag a section for box masking alt M to clear again so that's the Box mask and there's also the box hide so if I select the section there I can hide it and that's very handy but be careful because anything I drew on here well it has been the case in the past will not appear in my mirror so if I click on the Box hide again and then click on an empty space on my screen can you see my editing I've done here has not mirrored across so I'll undo that and now we're back to symmetry I could have actually just pressed my remesh and symmetrize in this x-axis option down here the last brush that I want to talk about is the simplify brush so if I click on that and change my resolution down to 25 and let's go to the tale because that was a high detail and start painting you can see it changes the resolution of my model I'll show you in wireframe you can see this detail air at the back here is changing the resolution very very useful that very very useful yet so some areas you might want to simplify the resolution let's say this area in here I can quickly use my simplified brush to reduce it back to solid mode and you can see what a mess it's made so be a little bit careful of this and that's the glitch you get when you've got a combination of high topology and low topology and we get rid of that by going to tab to edit mode and then back to scope mode but be a bit careful if you've got a really high resolution mesh and you go to edit mode it can mess things up perhaps a better option in that case would be just to click to layout mode where it's in object mode and back to scott mode but remember you might have to click on dine topo once again so that's all the brushes you can move your mouse over them to see the shortcuts which can be very helpful I encourage you to experiment and try things out and that's the way you'll learn and figure out what these things can do I will have more in this series of brushes and details like topology rake auto smooth stroke and fall-off in later episodes if you've got any questions do comment below you can also get across my website for free courses just like this one or across the discord server if you want to chat to like-minded people thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 812,314

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, brush, crease, pinch, draw, clay, snakehook, grab, flatten, scrape, mask, blender sculpting brushes, blender sculpting tools, 2.8

Id: L3XtAFUWNuk

Length: 25min 58sec (1558 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019