Texture Painting in Blender and rendering for Comics

everyone how's it going today I'm going to introduce a little concept that is probably the best way to get something that looks like a comic or an animation or toon shade and that is texture painting now it's a topic that I've sort of avoided for a while because I wanted to sort of like easy win show some procedural methods which are really good as an overall base but sooner or later you're gonna have to usually unwrapped something and you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and do some actual hand painting so today I'm hoping to demystify it a little bit give you something really simple to to look at our resurrected this old kind of rock thing that I was that I produced a couple years back because it's a really simple model to work on and it will allow us to look at the principles of texture painting and hopefully in a very easy to understand way so what I've got here is a rock with two materials okay there is rock one which is a sort of light tan and this rock - it's sort of like a darker tan and so these materials basically have been applied to faces procedurally just by sort of clicking on the face and then just going a sign and that will assign the material to that face now we're going to do something similar but we are going to sort of take this to the next level now gonna go over to my outliner here and I'm going to hide my old cliff face and I'm going to show you something that is untextured it's basically it got no materials whatsoever and we're going to begin the process of texture painting now it it begins with a UV and wrap so the first thing I'm going to do is go over to my UV editor because we want to look at the UVs and here is my 3d viewport we don't really need materials right now so but we'll need the screen in a moment so I'm just going to maximize our screen real-estate here and with my model if selected I'm going to go into tab and if everything isn't selected yet just hit a and then hit u to bring up our unwrap menu okay now let's just take a look at this for the moment now I've got this thing called live unwrap tick this is a really useful thing to have on because as you modify your unwrap it will automatically update it on the UV unwrap window over here which we're currently looking at a square you might have nothing but this is going to change momentarily so you and I'm just gonna hit unwrap now there is no seams on this and so it's basically giving it giving us the best approximation of how it blender would go about by flattening all of the surfaces on this particular model now I purposely models this with no base because for one thing a subsurface modifier means that nothing would sort of like creep underneath I wouldn't have to put an edge there but also if you unwrap this it will have an open edge and makes unwrapping a lot easier now there's a couple of modes in run wrap that you can take a look at first off let's take a look at smart UV project if you click on that okay we get this angle limit which is basically the angle before it begins to split off a bunch of faces island island margin and gives us a space between all of the islands that it will produce on our UV unwrap I don't really look at area weight at the moment so I'm just going to leave that to zero and then I'm just gonna hit OK now you'll see that a lot of little objects appear over here right and they might be easier to look at by corresponding them you can sort of see okay maybe that's the top area these are some of the faces over here but let's try something else let's go cube projection the cube projection does is it tries to estimate what this looks like from a bunch of sides and here we've got a very weird cube projection let's see if we reset that and now to a cute note still gives us a bit of a weird thing cylinder projection tries to unwrap it as if it a cylinder and you can see that the top here is really kind of skewing off sphere projection does something similar and all this really does is it tries to assume that this shape has got a primitive of sphere cylinder or cube and then tries to stretch out the UVs to match that and then of course this stuff like project from view which means that this is the view and so this is how all the faces are projected onto the UV unwrap I am going to just do a normal unwrap and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create what's known as a seam so I'm gonna select I'm just gonna go into edge select mode by hitting keyboard - I'm gonna go shift alt and I can select this edge that's running down the side here yep then I'm going to select shift alt this edge here this edge here this edge here okay and I'm gonna leave this one alone now all of those edges I'm now gonna go ctrl e mark seam right now when I go and select everything you'll see that everything has been unwrapped in a different way you'll see that because I've got this live unwrap thing it means that it just automatically updates it and this is sort of what we want we can sort of see that these correspond to the four sides of our monolith and this corresponds to the top almost like it's been you know cut open and sort of flattened out and that's basically what UV unwrapping is now I'm not going to go ahead and try to massage these in any meaningful way because this unwrap will work for our purposes so that's as far as I'm gonna take UV unwrapping it's a actually quite simple once you get your head around it and this is going to make life a heck of a lot simpler for texture painting so let's get on with texture painting now so I'm going to go from object mode to texture paint mode okay and you'll see that you know UV unwrap we get this sort of grayed out of version of our unwrap over here but what I want to do is go up to our new context settings over here because we can actually see our texture painting tools and all that sort of stuff right here which is actually a little bit easier to handle now if you don't have this top bar okay it says text draw a color radius all that that's because it hasn't been enabled in tool settings okay so by default you might have this if you need those tool settings just go on to view and then just go tool settings and there we've got our tool settings up here where we can see them but these will correspond a little bit too over here as well and so the first thing we want to do is create a texture so where it says no texture I'm gonna hit plus and I'm gonna create a base color now this time I'm going to make my width and height a lot bigger because I want this to create a texture map that can be viewed fairly reasonably close up the closer you're going to get to an object of the larger you want your texture to be okay 102 4 isn't gonna cut it if you're gonna get your camera right in there because you're gonna start seeing all the pixelation and the stretching of the UV unwrap on the surfaces themselves right the edges of your model will render crisp and clear but you're talking about an image like that's been then plastered on to your object and that's got to also have resolution as well so I'm gonna bump this up to four oh nine six something nice and high I'm gonna leave this color as black and I'm gonna let leave the generation type as blank so now this is called a material base color which over in the UV unwrap I can now select the material base color and you'll see that there it is with the unwrap and it's got our black color now I normally like to work in a very dark tone for this because if I was to say work on the base color for the beginning it just means that I won't know where you know if I was just looking at the texture where the the cutout as it were was so now what we want to do obviously is to fill this up but first I have to draw your attention down here to my shader editor and you'll see that automatically it's created a material for us and it consists of three things it consists of the material base color okay that we've just generated it's generated a texture inside of blender it's got a principal shader which we don't really need and then it's got a material output so we can see anything that is going to be mapped on to our object now we're working in cycles I don't really need the principal base shader so what I'm gonna do is something a little bit clever here because it works in 2.8 I'm just going to connect the color to the output get rid of the shader all together and you'll notice that we now have no shading information there now if you do need some shading or something like that maybe throw in a diffuse shader it's a little bit more lightweight and so you'll actually see some shadows but in 2.80 you don't really need to do that and we do really just want to see the colors because this is for tuned shading after all so we've got brush we've got a color selected it probably is going to be black but this is one that sort of like impress it and a bunch of other stuff we don't really need to look at the moment because the first thing I want to do is completely fill this object now it by default texture draw means that if I draw my brush across the surface you'll see that it fills where I painted now I have set my fall-off to this which is basically absolute because I do want a block color for now now take a look at what happened over at the UV unwrapping okay we now have some color showing up on the corresponding faces so we can already see that these faces correspond to this and because the scene was down this edge my mistake I should really put this around the back edge but let's just work with this you can see that it will basically follow on correctly onto its opposing unwrapped edge but what I want to do is fill this okay I want to fill it once and because I want to work fast and I want to work precisely so in my tea like left hand tool menu we've got our brush selections and one of these is fill so I'm going to click on that and now when I click on the object I'll click a few times because it will just brighten it up every time okay we get the color filling the entire object and this is a real time-saver for the beginnings of creating a basic tune unwrap I'm just going to go back into object mode for a second and if I was to take a look at this collection over here next thing I want to do is obviously get these nice striations in there and so what one thing that we can do is actually select faces and use them as a mask when texture painting so let's say that this is our base color now I'm going to go over into edit mode and I'm going to set it to faces and we're going to go ahead and select a bunch of bands here now the way I do this is by it's a bit of a keyboard mash shift ctrl alt and select an edge and that selects an edge ring but because we're in face select mode it will select all the faces in that ring and you can see the corresponding faces show up on our UV unwrap let's select a few more so now we've selected a bunch of bands here that we want to texture a different color by applying that fill operation once again so we go into texture paint mode now we can change the color I can't just go ahead and hit fill because this is going to blank it fill everything we haven't enabled a mask yet now because in edit mode we've got these faces selected and they still show up tab back into texture paint this icon over here paint mask face selection masking for painting we click on that and now our masks show up with our fill we can now click a couple of times okay and now when we go into object mode there we have art showing up a little bit and this sort of you might get this problem a little bit and it's it's with this sort of fill operation we are in our next step going to fix this I'm just going to save my file before we get into the specifics of texture painting and this is where I really stress you need to get a Wacom tablet to do some drawing and I'm gonna show you two ways of drawing onto this mesh now the first way let's go back into texture paint mode and let's take off mask we're going to go into draw mode now I'm going to switch from UV editor mode on this window to my image editor and this is because that it's got a selection where we can go from view to paint and another thing we can do is we can hide the texture painted UVs okay which will make it a little bit simpler to paint as well now the thing about this this mode is that we also have these brushes that correspond to the brushes here so we've got basically two windows on which we can paint in a similar way but two different methods so let's begin by going into 3d mode now much like grease pencil or anything else you've got radius you've got strength and you've got these pressure sensitivity buttons I definitely want it for radius I don't particularly need it for strength because I want my strength to be at a hundred percent I'm also going to make my radius about 25 that's a nicer thing and with this color selected I can now paint directly on the surface and I can because I want to clean this up a little bit it's going to allow me to fix up these problem areas but also give it a bit of a hand-painted look right because we don't want this super super smooth we want it quite nice and bumpy now if you don't like going round and round your model okay sort of fixing things up bit by bit there is another way and that way is to paint on this surface so you can already see where we've begun to paint and we can actually paint in along these lines and this will actually help get rid of some of that jaggedness that we sort of see in our result right and so if you prefer to paint on a 2d surface you've got this option but if you prefer to paint on a 3d surface you also have the other option now both have got their pros and cons because this is an unwrapped surface watch what happens if I was to say paint over say this edge over here okay we're gonna swing this around to where we have our seam you can see that the scene here is really showing up and that's where you sort of need to go into your 3d viewport and sort of do a little bit of touching up the other thing of course that I would like to do is to add more tuned detail and the stuff that I want to do is put some like nice more or wavy striations in there some circles and sort of really sell that this is sort of a rock so let's let's start with the reverse okay let's start in the darker areas because we've got our lighter color here now I can use my bracket tool my left bracket to decrease the brush or right bracket to increase the brush so I'm gonna decrease it to something nice and small and let's say I'm gonna put a little mark over here so I know that that's okay that's where we're at over here I'm now just going to draw a very nice fine line across there now you can already see that I'm showing up the crease edge over here because I'm never actually going to get a perfect paint on this but the beauty of this is that you can then paint on the 3d surface let's get that and correct your your painting so that it matches up seamlessly so basically I've just jumped ahead to just adding a bit more detail doing a bit more cleanup the using our two methods and it's sort of like you can see that this drawing is really starting to take shape and it's starting to look like a nice tuned style of rock and it's still a couple of areas that might need a little bit of cleanup and I thought I'd use that opportunity to tell you a little bit about some of the brush settings that you have at your disposal so let's take a look at some of the ones here in your texture context tools okay so if we went down a little you can see that you can change your stroke to a different type of method okay depending on what you need space seems to be the nice default and you can even change the pressure so you can get a really nice even stroke and that's that comes in very handy for cleaning up these problem areas when we're sort of drawing on here now one of the reasons that it begins to distort in certain part is because some of the faces are actually stretching the texture okay and there's not a lot you can do to avoid that unless you sort of have to put in a lot more information in there so you can sort of avoid or reduce the stretching and now the spacing here is set the temps and that's pretty good but if we sort of bumped that up what would happen is that you'd actually see the space between the dots that you're painting so you sort of want to bring that down to as low as possible without making your machine grind to a halt and then you want to sort of change the input sample to something that is it's an input sample of one is very inaccurate but you can sort of bump that up a little bit and then suddenly your input sample gives you a smooth results when fixing that now in this instance what I'm probably going to have to do is going to have to find the happy medium okay so that seems to be where the face doesn't stretch so much so let's just color that in like so and I think the opposite is true for here yep okay so it's just a little higher than what we had okay as so using those tools you can quickly clean up your texture paint but you know once you've got your texture painting sort of where you want it to be we've got a rock face that looks really really good and now it's ready to render now as I've shown you in a previous video the method that I like to use for rendering is to have a diffuse material in there to catch shadows and then render out your diffuse pass so I'm gonna go ahead and set that up okay under my view layer properties I'm going to click color on diffuse I'm going to make sure that under my filter we don't really need freestyle for this one and be an occlusion environmental here we just need surfaces and we do want a shadow pass okay so we've got color shadow let's just close down this window over here so we can sort of see what we're going to be rendering in our objects shader editor shift a shader diffuse okay so we can get some shading information in there so if we were to render you just sort of see that this is what we get our light let's just get out in the object mode sorry our light and let's set our angle to zero because this will give us a really nice sharp shadow and we do want some texture on that now let's go over into our compositor where we should have a renders layer panel an a composite and I'm just gonna do a quick render on that now your total image looks a little dark okay but that's because what we really want is our diffuse color information to come through first and foremost okay and so there it's looking very much like a cartoon of course the Alpha Channel doesn't get correctly knocked down so what we want to do is go shift a converter set alpha and we're going to set that alpha to the image and then we're going to throw in a mix RGB node to bring in our shadow information sit on a multiply and you can already see that those shadows are starting to really fill in those gaps but we want something else a little bit more stark and prominent so I'm gonna rotate this lamp around so that it's uh let's see if we can sort of see the entire thing here let's rotate it around so we got to sort of get half of the object in shadow and let's just do another render there okay because this is gonna work a lot better for our purposes and there we're starting to really see something that looks more cartoony now we can just drop that factor back ever so slightly and now we're starting to get something that looks like a really nice tuned Rock I'm just going to delete this plane here it's just so we can get the tune on its own when we do a render because I'm gonna do one more thing and that is give it an outline and that again is done very very simply I'm gonna duplicate this set alpha you know drag that alpha over there and I'm gonna bring in a dilate erode filter and I'm gonna set that to distance let's get that about three this is a really cheap way of getting a good outline on your object so I'll just do a quick rerender of that so we've just got the tune rock asset bring this down here and because it's going to be the diffuse color over the top just duplicate that one set that to mix and put this in the second operation 100% and drag that down at the bottom and now you can sort of see that we've get this nice edge line that we can increase or decrease or whatever and then finally all we really need is a background image to alpha over it and we can just use another mix node that's not a problem what we do is just set that on the second operation and that on the first but now what we need to do is find an image so I'm just gonna go over to some nice clouds here for instance and I'll just adjust my camera so it's looking up at the rock and so like we can't really see any kind of ground let's try to get as much in there as possible and once again do one final render now the rear entering so quickly is because I've dropped my samples extremely low and that's fine for two and shading because you all all you want to do is get some color information and there you have it okay we've done a little bit of texture painting to get this rock looking really nice this will make a really nice background element for a comic or illustration and it also works for animations and stuff like that but you can already see how those shadows play really nicely on the topology of this rock and that we've got these nice hand-painted textures that we've put in there a completely inside of blender ok I hope you got a lot out of this guys thanks for watching there's Paul signing off bye for now [Music]

Channel: Paul O Caggegi

Views: 19,330

Keywords: blender, texture painting, comics

Id: vIBmH8rVoIA

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019