Texture Painting for Beginners 🖌️ (Blender Tutorial)

in this blender tutorial I will show you how to do texture painting for beginners so in this video I'm going to cover all the basic things that you need to know to get started with texture painting so I'm first going to show you how to set up your object for texture painting and then I'm going to go over the brushes and the different tools and the different shortcut keys that you'll use for texture painting and then after you watch this beginner tutorial if you'd like to learn more about texture painting and blender then I also have a texture painting tutorial playlist that you can check out with the link in the description and in that playlist I have some other texture painting tutorials like how to paint roughness maps how to paint bump maps and also how to use the stencil brush to paint textures onto your object and for demonstration in this video I'm going to be using this stylized pumpkin 3D model and I actually have a step-by-step tutorial on how to create this pumpkin and how to texture paint it and then also how to set up the lighting and give it a nice render so if you'd like to check out that video as well links in the description and that would be a great tutorial to watch after you learn the basics of texture painting so I'll be using this model as an example for texture painting so if you'd like to learn how to create this model you can check out that other video where I show you how to model this or you can of course just use any object that you want to texture paint and if you'd like to purchase the project files of this pumpkin model that'll have links in the description too where you can purchase this model on my gumroad store and my patreon page and also on my gumroad store and my patreon page you can get 3D models and assets you can get artwork project files and procedural materials and all of my tutorial files so checking out my gumroad store and patreon Page are great ways to help support me and this Channel and some great ways to help support the channel here on YouTube is by checking out the YouTube memberships by clicking on the join button right down there next to the Subscribe button and by joining the YouTube memberships you'll be helping to support the channel monthly and you'll get some cool perks here on YouTube and if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to give me a little tip you can also use the super thanks feature here on YouTube and send me a little tip and I do really appreciate all of your support because it really helps me to keep on creating blender tutorials and content now before we actually get started with the texture painting I did want to talk about drawing tablets really quick because I think using a drawing tablet is really important for texture painting now if you don't have a drawing tablet or you're not able to get one then you can use a mouse to do texture painting but I think it's a lot harder to texture paint with a mouse and I don't think the result is going to be quite as good because with a drawing tablet you're able to have a much better posture you're able to make nice smooth Strokes with the pen and most drawing tablet pens also have pen pressure and using the pen pressure can be really helpful when texture painting So if you're able to use a drawing tablet or if you're able to get one then I would highly recommend you do that so I'm going to be using my huey on display tablet so it's actually a screen tablet where I can draw on the screen but you definitely don't need something that fancy even if you can just get one of those smaller pad tablets that will be way better than using a mouse so before I got the Huey on display tablet that I'm using now I was using a welcome pad tablet and I can highly recommend that tablet it works really well and even just using one of those pad tablets is going to be way better than using a mouse and I will have some Amazon links in the description to some tablets that I recommend if you'd like to check those out and also I'll have a link in the description to the drawing glove that I use and I really like this drawing glove because it helps my hand to move smoothly on the drawing tablet surface and those are affiliate links so if you purchase something through those links that will help me out but with no extra cost to you alright so here is the pumpkin model that I'm going to be using and again if you'd like to learn how to model this pumpkin then you can check out the other video where I show you how to model the pumpkin or you can also purchase the project files with the link in the description or just use whatever model that you want to texture paint so the first thing that we need to do is add a material to this object so I'm just going to select the object here and then I'm going to go over to the shading tab so in the shading workspace here I have the 3D space here and then I have the Shader editor right here and so right here I'm going to click on new to add a new material and I can just rename the material alright so now that we've added a material onto this object we need to create an image texture that we're actually going to texture paint on and I'm going to be creating an image texture for the base color because we're going to be painting the base color so to do this I'm going to press shift a and I'm going to click right here on the search and I'm going to search for the image texture node and let's just drop this right here and then we can plug the color up to the base color of the printable Shader and this way we'll actually be able to preview the image texture for the base color of the object now we haven't added a texture so let's click on the new button to actually create a new image texture so I'm going to click on the new button here and then on the name here I'm just going to call this pumpkin color now on the width and height here the default is just a 1K texture but that's actually a bit low quality I prefer to use a 4K image texture so what I'm going to do is Click right here and then then drag down and then let go and this way I can change the width and height at the same time so I'm going to type in 4096 and then hit enter so now it's 4096 pixels by 4096 pixels and this is the standard resolution for a 4K texture or you can also use a 2K texture or an 8K texture or whatever you want to do I'm going to use a 4K texture now on the color here you want to change this to whatever the main base color is going to be for the texture painting so because this is a pumpkin I'm going to make this a very bright color and then I'm going to make it an orange color so something like that so we can leave all these other settings at the default and then I'm going to click on OK so we have now created an image texture in blender and also right here on the color space this is the color map so it is contributing to the base color of the material so I'm going to leave the color space at the default of srgb because the color is contributing to the base color so the next thing we need to do is UV unwrap the object because basically when need a towel blender how we want the 3D mesh to be placed on the 2D image texture now I'm not going to go into a ton of detail about UV unwrapping in blender but if you'd like to check out my UV unwrapping for beginners tutorial I'll have the link in the description and you can learn the basics of UV unwrapping but what I'm going to do is Click right over here to go to the UV editing layout and we can UV unwrap this so I've already UV unwrapped this pumpkin because I used it in a different tutorial but I'm just going to re-uvian wrap this and for most objects like this if all you're doing is texture painting there is a really quick and easy method for UV unwrapping so what you can do in edit mode is press the a key to select all of the object then you can press the U button and that's going to bring up the unwrap settings and I can just choose the smart UV project so I'm just going to click on this now right here on the island margin we do want a little bit of space in between the UV Islands so that there isn't any overlapping so I'm just going to change this to like a 0.001 a point zero zero one and then just click on OK and so this is just going to do a super quick and dirty uvan wrap but if all you're doing is texture painting then this usually works really well and right up here this was the old texture painted map that I was using in the other tutorial so I'm just going to click on the x button to get rid of that and then I can actually click right here on the drop down and this is going to show me the textures and we just created the pumpkin color so I'm going to click on this and then that will add it in so this is the image texture that we're going to be painting on so the smart UV project is a really quick and easy way to UV and wrap your objects and it works really great for texture painting but again if you'd like to learn more about UV unwrapping in blender then you can check out my uvn wrapping for beginners tutorial with the link in the description now there are just a couple things I will go over with the UV unwrapping one thing is that you want to make sure that you scale this up as large as possible and so if you have any extra space here you can press the a key to select the islands and then then you can scale them up to make them bigger so for instance I could hover my mouse over this object here or over the island and press the L key to select the linked vertices and then I could press s to scale and G to grab and I could move this over and scale it up because basically you want your UV Islands to be as large as possible so that they use as many of the pixels as possible so it's the highest quality because for instance right up here there's this big area where we're not actually using any of the texture so that's basically wasted pixels where we're not actually using the image texture now there are going to be some spaces here and there that you just can't use but you do want to scale this up as large as possible and then a couple other things that you want to make sure is that there isn't any overlap so you can just take a look at your UV map and make sure there isn't anything that's overlapping and this looks all good you can also click right here on select and then click on select overlap and blender is going to select anything which is overlapping and then one other really important thing is to make sure that the UV Islands isn't going out of the texture so just make sure that all of your UV eyelin are within the boundaries of the image texture in this case they all are alright so we've UV unwrapped the object so we can now hop over to the texture painting workspace so if you're right back over here on the layout and you want to do the texture painting in the layout then you can just click here on object mode and you can go over to the texture painting mode and this will actually take you into the texture painting but instead of using the texture painting mode right here in the layout I prefer to use the texture painting workspace here in blender because this is automatically going to take me into the texture painting mode and it's going to show me some different options and tools for texture painting and then also right over here on this side panel you want to click right up here to go to the active tool and workspace settings so that you can see more of the texture painting options alright so I'm now going to bring blender over to my display drawing tablet and we can get started alright so we have the 3D space right here and then we have the image editor right here so you can texture paint on the image editor so you can texture paint on the flat image if you if you want to but it's much more intuitive and it makes a lot more sense to texture paint on the 3D object so what I'm going to do is Click right here or press down with my pen and then drag over here and actually I just realized that I forgot to turn on the screencast keys so sorry about that but you can see my screencast keys right down here in the corner and of course it looks like I'm using my mouse but I'm actually using my drawing tablet pen alright so let's first go over some navigation how to move around with the drawing tablet so most drawing tablet pens are going to have a front pen button and a back pen button that is very standard for most drawing tablets so if I want to navigate around I'm just going to click with my front pen button and then I'm going to move along the top of the screen surface I'm not actually pressing my pen down on the screen surface I'm just hovering it over the screen service so just press down with the front pen button and then move around now if you want to zoom in and out you can hold down the control key so right next to my drawing tablet I have my keyboard right here and so I have my other hand on the shift and control button and I'm actually left-handed so I'm actually drawing with my left hand and then my right hand is on the shift and control and ALT keys so to zoom in and out I'm going to hold down the control key and then click with my front pen button and then drag my pen and I can zoom in and out and then if I want to pan around I can hold down the shift key and click and drag with my front pen button and that's going to pan me around so control click and shift click and then if I just want to rotate around I can just press the front pen button and I can rotate around so if you press the T key that is going to open up this side panel right here and we have all the different tools for texture painting so the first one here is the default draw brush and so this is just the default brush and so then what I can do is I can just push down on my drawing tablet and I can add color there now you might be wondering why there's only one brush here and that's because blender has just a default draw brush but then if you want to change the settings of the brush the settings can be changed right up here so there's a bunch of different settings right up here which we'll be going over like the stroke settings right here and then also right here on this side panel there are some brush settings right here and some settings here so we'll be going over the settings later in the video now the next tool right here is the soften brush so I'm going to click on this and what I can do is just press down with my tablet and I can soften this so I'm just going to zoom in here and just paint there and soften the edge so I'm going to click back on the draw brush right here and then I'm just going to go back and forth here and kind of make a white line there and then I can click right back here on the soften brush and then I can just go along here and you can see it's going to soften that up and kind of blur it a little bit so the next tool is similar and that is the smear brush so I'm going to click on the smear brush and then you have radius and strength values right here so I'm just going to click and drag to make the radius bigger and then I can just go along there and you can see this is going to kind of smudge it so this this is basically going to move the color around whereas the soften brush is just going to kind of blur it but the smear brush will actually like move the color around and it's going to be a lot stronger and more intense and then the next one is the Clone brush so I'll just click on the Clone brush and then I can also click and drag right here to make the radius bigger so how the Clone brush works is it's going to clone wherever the 3D cursor is so this thing right here this is the 3D cursor and if you want to move this around in the texture painting you can hold down the shift key and then you can click with the back pen button so hold down the shift key and then click with the back pen button and you can see I can move the 3D cursor around or I can click and hold with the back pen button with the shift key held down and I can move this around and then once you've placed this where you want you can paint in a different area using the Clone brush and you can see it's going to clone wherever the 3D cursor is but then if I want a clone maybe this area right down here now I can paint here and you can see it's going to clone that area now left click select is the default in blender but when I first started using blender right click select was the default and so I just got used to using right click and so now I still use right click select so if you are using the right click select like I am then you can hold down the control key and then press on the tablet and that is going to move the 3D cursor around but for most people who are using the left click select you're going to hold down the shift key and then click with the back pen button and that's going to move the 3D cursor around alright so let's go to the next tool which is the fill tool so I'm just going to click on the fill tool and so when you're using the fill tool it's just going to fill whatever color you have so right up here you can actually change the colors by clicking right here so I might just change this to like an orangey red color and then I'm just going to press down with my pen and that is going to fill it so you can see now the entire pumpkin is that color so the fill tool is just going to make the entire object one color I'm just going to press Ctrl Z though to undo that because I don't want to use the fill tool and then the last one here is the mask brush I'm not going to go over this in this video because this is a little bit more advanced I might make a specific video on this but this is just texture painting for beginners so I just want to go over the basic things that I think you need to know to get started with texture painting all right so now I'm going to go over some basic brush settings so make sure you are using the default draw brush right here so if you want to change the color it's going to be right up here so you can click right here to change the color and you can just change this to whatever color you want now you can see next to this color there is also a secondary color and so I'm just going to change this color so I think I will make this like a bright green color so on default blender is going to paint with the primary color so I can just paint kind of this purpley color but if I want to switch the colors I can hit the X key the X key is going to flip these colors and so now I can paint with green but then if I want to switch back to purple I can hit the X key again and that'll flip it and then I can paint with purple so this is a really great way to switch between two colors if you have two main colors that you want to paint with now right up here you also have a radius and a strength so the radius is going to change the size of the brush so I could drag this bigger and then it's going to paint really big or I could make it smaller now the shortcut key for the radius is the F key so I'm going to press the F key I can drag out and then click and now it's bigger or I can press the F key make it smaller and then paint now there also is a strength value right here so again I could turn this way down and then I can paint it's going to be very subtle or I could turn this way up and it's going to be a lot stronger and the shortcut key for changing the strength is shift F so press shift f i can drag this down and then I can paint you can see it's much more subtle or I can press shift F I can make this really strong all the way to one and now it's going to be much stronger now right next to the radius and the strength you can see there's this little button here which is going to use the pen pressure so most tablet pens will come with pen pressure and Pen pressure is super useful and it's one big reason why I really love drawing tablets now if you want to use the pen pressure you can just click on the button and when it is blue you're going to actually be using the pen pressure and then I'm just going to press the F key to make my brush bigger so first let's just turn on the radius and I'm going to turn off the string so now if I start to paint here you can see as I push harder down with my pen it's going to make a bigger radius so if I'm just pressing really lightly it's going to be very very small and then as I press down really hard it's really big so this is super helpful and I really love this when doing texture painting I really love using the pen pressure and then let's click here to turn off the radius and let's instead click right here to turn on the strength so this is going to do the same thing but for the strength so if I start to paint and if I'm pressing down really lightly you can see it's not very strong but then as I press down harder it's going to be more strong and if I want to use these both at the same time I could just click on both of these to turn them on and now let me just go to a new Fresh area I can start to paint it's going to be very subtle and smaller and then as I press down harder and harder it's going to get bigger and stronger so this is a super awesome feature and I really like using the pen pressure now different tablets are going to have different amounts of pen pressure so when you're looking at tablets if you want to purchase a drawing tablet it should tell you in the product description how many levels of pen pressure it has and I believe this tablet here I believe it has about 8 000 levels now if you want to select a color which you're already using you can press the S key and the S key is going to bring up the color selector so then I can just navigate over here and I can select this color and then let go the S button and now I can paint with that color or I can hit the S button go over here to the orange let go and then I can paint orange so this is super useful for just selecting colors which you're already using so I could select this green color kind of paint over here paint over the purple and then press the S key again and select a color and then paint that alright so so I now want to go over some basic brush settings because right now we're just still using the default brush settings so if you click with your front pen button and drag over here there are some stroke settings right here so there's some Different Stroke methods so the default one is space and so this is just the default stroke method and it's going to add a little bit of space in between all of the dots so basically when you're painting blender is actually just adding a bunch of dots and it's adding them really close to each other so you don't actually notice it but if you click here on the stroke settings you can turn up the spacing so I'm going to turn this way up and now as I paint you can see that it's going to add some Dots here and so there is now a really big space between those dots but the default is just a spacing of 10 so if I turn this way down now there's going to be a much smaller spacing let me just turn this to something in between so I could maybe turn this up here and now you can see there's just a bunch of dots and this is actually super useful if you want to paint dots on your object and in the tutorial where I texture paint this pumpkin we actually really change this color here to like a yellow color so I could just change this to Yellow I can go right here to the stroke settings and I can turn the spacing up quite a bit and then what we did is we went along here and we added a bunch of little dots onto the pumpkin now right up here on the stroke settings there is also a Jitter and this is a really cool feature so I'm going to turn the Jitter amount up so I'm going to turn the Jitter really high up to a value of two so now as I start to paint you can see the dots are kind of randomly jittering around and even though I'm drawing a straight line here the dots are just kind of randomly jittering around so if you want to make the dots look a bit more organic and random and natural you could turn up that Jitter amount that's a really cool feature it's just going to kind of Jitter the dots around or I could turn the spacing back to the default of 10 and then I can just kind of go along here and you can see it's going to add that really cool effect and the spacing can also use the pen pressure by clicking on that button and also the Jitter also has that pen pressure right there now I'm going to turn the Jitter to zero because I I don't want to use any of the Jitter now there's also this really cool stabilized stroke right here so I'm going to turn on the stabilized stroke so now as I draw it's going to add a little line behind me and so it's going to be very stable so you can see it's basically just smoothing out the lines and so if I want to make very smooth lines I could use this stabilize and this is very helpful now right here on the stroke method there are a bunch of different options I just want to go over some of the main ones that you're going to use so I don't want to overwhelm you with all the settings I just want to go over the main settings that you're going to use so if you want to paint straight lines you can change the stroke method to line and now what I can do is I can click right here and drag and you can see it's going to give me this little black and white line and then when I let go it's going to add a straight line there and it looks like there is a small issue with the UV mapping let me just try this on a different area so I can drag down and there we go so it's going to draw straight lines and then you could also turn up the Jitter amount and so if you turn up the Jitter it's going to add a bunch of little dots there on the lines and this also has spacing as well so I could turn up the spacing maybe turn the Jitter back to zero and then what I could do is go here and I could drag and then let go and you can see it's going to add a bunch of dots and they're evenly placed along that line now if you want to paint with a symmetry what you can do is you can click and drag over here and there is some symmetry options right here so I'm just going to click on y to turn on the Y symmetry you could also use all of them or just the x or just the Z so now the Y symmetry is turned on I'm going to press the F key to make my brush smaller and I can start to paint here and you can see because this is the y-axis right here the green line is the y-axis you can see it's basically going to mirror your texture painting So this can be useful for certain things for an organic model like this I wouldn't really use it that much but you can definitely use this for many things or I could turn them all on so right over here I could turn on the X and the Z and now if I start to paint here you can see it's going to mirror it over up and down and then it's also going to mirror it on the side and you could do some pretty cool things with this now as your texture painting if you want to change how the viewport looks then you can click right up here to go to the viewport shading and you can change this lighting here so you can change the matte cap so if you click right here there's going to be a bunch of different default Mac apps and blender I've actually added in my own Mac caps but you will have some different Mac cups here to choose from you could also use the studio here and that's going to give you some different mat caps and you could change this to see the mesh better or if you actually didn't want to see any shading and you just want it to be flat you can click on this flat right here and then this is just going to show you the flat color although this isn't actually super useful for painting the pumpkin because I do want to be able to see where the creases are but if you're just painting like a flat image or like a flat plane then this might be very useful and then one other thing I wanted to show you about texture painting if you have lots of different colors which you want to use you can actually create a color palette so right over here on the active tool and workspace settings you can open up the brush settings right here here and then you can open up the color palette and you can click on new here to create a new color palette so then I can click on the plus here to add a new color I'm going to click on this and then you can see it's going to add whatever color you have here so this is going to be a blue color so I can now paint with blue but then maybe I want to use like a purple color so I can make this purple here and then I can click on the plus here to add a new color here in the color palette and then I could paint with this purple color so if you have lots of common colors which you want to use you can add them to the color palette I could also make one more like maybe a red color and then click on the plus here so now I can paint with this and then I could click right over here to change the color then I can paint with blue and then I could click right over here to change this to purple or as I mentioned earlier if you want to select colors which are already on the object you can hold down the S key and then drag over a color and then you can paint with that color alright now when you are finished texture painting it's really important to save your image to your computer because this image file right here isn't actually going to say leave in blender and so if you close blender without saving this image to your computer then blender is going to lose the texture data so what you want to do when you're done texture painting is Click right up here on image and then I can click on save as and then I can just name this pumpkincolor.png you can also change the file format right here I'm going to save this as a PNG image in a folder with my files and then click on save as so we have now saved this to an image file on our computer so if we close blender then blender will still keep the texture data so now that I'm done texture painting I can click right back over here to go to the shading workspace and then in the shading workspace I could continue to edit the material so if I want to like change the roughness I could change that and also if this were like a metal material I could turn up the metallic value or I could also add like some procedural noise into the normal to give it some bump and just continue to play around with the material but that is it that is the basics of texture painting in blender now now there are still many other features of texture painting which I haven't covered in this video so if you'd like to learn more about texture painting and blender then you can check out my texture painting tutorial playlist with the link in the description and in that playlist I have some other videos like how to paint textures on your objects using the stencil brush also how to paint gradients if you want to learn how to paint gradients and soon after making this video I'll also be uploading some other tutorials like how to paint roughness maps and how to paint normal maps and some other texture painting tutorials and if you'd like to learn how to create this stylized hand-painted pumpkin then I also have a complete tutorial where I show you step by step in real time how to create this stylized pumpkin and if you enjoy my tutorials and you'd like to help support me and this channel I will also have links in the description to my gumroads door and my patreon page and the YouTube memberships and I do really appreciate all of your support it really does help me to keep creating blender tutorials and content but also just liking sharing comment commenting and subscribing all of that really does help me out as well because it helps my videos get out to more people but this is going to wrap it up for this video so I hope you found this video helpful I hope you enjoyed it and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 97,039

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, texture painting, painting, blender, texture painting for beginners, blender tutorial, beginner tutorial, painting blender, texture paint, pumpkin

Id: 6jT4K0JpGNs

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022