Texture Painting in Blender for Absolute Beginners

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting blender tutorial so you've modeled something awesome in blender and it comes out looking all gray and naked because you haven't yet assigned any materials or any textures to it now there's tons of different ways to um dress up your 3d model from simple materials to texture maps to highly complex procedural shaders in this video i want to show you another way that i personally actually like to use a lot and that is to use texture painting in blender with texture painting you can use the brush tools in blender to paint any color that you want onto the 3d geometry of your model now you still have to create empty textures and define uv maps to essentially wrap an empty canvas around your 3d model ready for you to paint on but don't worry if that sounds complicated it's all not that bad and in this tutorial i will talk you through all of that nice and easy however this is still going to be an intermediate tutorial and i will assume that you are at least familiar with the very basics of blender if you're totally new to this awesome program i'm going to drop you some links to my beginner tutorial series down in the video description so be sure to check that out first before you come back here but now this pool floating island has been embarrassingly devoid of coverage for long enough let's jump right into the tutorial [Music] welcome to the exciting world of blender i have a really nice low poly floating island model right here and no i didn't create this i'm not much of a 3d artist instead i actually just downloaded this model from blender so it was created by utsava sharma so thank you very much for this model here all i've really done is imported into my scene i've removed all of the materials because we're going to paint it and the only other thing i did is i added an environment map just to add a little bit of lighting to this little polygonal model but there are no textures on this yet because i want to talk about how you can essentially paint on your colors and your textures directly in blender you'll be able to use this technique with any model that you create or models that you download online so let's zoom in a little bit and let's say we want to paint this tree so select the tree press ctrl or command and tap and switch over to the texture paint mode your cursor will change into a brush and over on the left hand side you now have brushes soften smear clone stamp fill and masking tools available here and you can now click and drag on the tree and chances are absolutely nothing will happen over in the bottom right hand side here you can see an era saying missing uvs materials and textures our tree isn't quite yet ready to be painted on because this particular one doesn't even have a uv map which would tell blender how this 3d model maps to a two-dimensional texture and what we have to do is we need to unwrap this model which is kind of like taking this 3d model cutting it open and flattening it out onto a 2d paper on our texture that we can then paint on and then that texture will appear on our 3d model in order to do that let's jump over into edit mode so press ctrl or command and tap let's jump over into edit mode let's press a to make sure everything is selected and let's generate a uv map for the selected geometry for that however first i want to actually see the uv editor so you can see what is happening for that simply right click on one of the separating lines here at the top of this 3d view select to create a vertical split and let's split the view right here over on the left hand side i'm going to change this over to be my uv editor and if you zoom in there's nothing here because well this geometry doesn't yet have a uv map in order to create one make sure that the entire tree or whichever model you want to create your uv map for is selected come up into the menu select uvs and select smart uv project most of the time you can leave all of these settings on the default then hit ok and now over on the left hand side you can see that this essentially has cut up the geometry of a tree and kind of spread it out on a flat 2d image and this is now how this 3d geometry is going to be mapped to a 2d texture so this is now the uv map for this tree we want to make the uv editor just a little bit smaller over on the left hand side hope you cursor back in your 3d view ctrl tab let's return to texture paint mode let's zoom in again let's try this again click and drag over your tree and again nothing happens and it says missing materials and textures detected and that is because well we've defined the uv map but we haven't assigned a texture to this tree or mapped that texture to a material that is assigned to the tree so first off let's create a texture we can actually draw on for that while you're in texture paint mode over on the right hand side in the properties panel come to the tool settings and in here you will now find an option for texture slots by default this mode will be set to material but i'm actually going to change this drop down here from material to single image because i just want to paint on a single texture now by default there is no texture available here so you need to click on new to create a new image let's call this tree texture you can increase the resolution as well if you want a more high resolution texture to paint on i'm just going to leave all of this on default let's hit ok and you may have noticed how in the uv editor now there is a black background underneath our uv and this black image in the background is the actual texture this is our tree texture and you can see it at the top here we have tree texture selected and on top of that you can see the uv mapping for our tree so how the tree geometry is going to map onto that texture so now once again let's come into the 3d view zoom in just a little bit and let's click and drag over this tree now we didn't get an error the tree hasn't changed but over on the left hand side you can see that the texture has actually changed now why can't we see this in our 3d view the reason for that is that my shading mode right now is set to rendered this means that it will use the material that is currently assigned to the tree to show me what that looks like and well my tree has no material just yet however you can still preview the texture that you're painting on by coming over into the solid shading mode and now with a uv assigned to our object a texture setup to paint on you can now see this texture and you can click and drag to paint directly on it and this is actually where all of the magic happens this is where you can now select your colors and kind of paint your tree in now if you want to see the actual texture on the tree which is kind of what we want in the end let's come back to the rendered shading view there's nothing on this tree so in the properties panel let's come down into the materials tab again remember we have our tree selected right now let's click new to create a new material i'm going to call this one tree material then come down a little bit and let's click on this little yellow dot here on base color to change what we're inputting as the base color in this little pop-up window select to use an image texture as the base color for this tree and now from this drop down here we can now select the texture we want to assign and i want to use my tree texture which is the texture we've set up to paint on let's select this and you can now see the painted on texture assigned to the tree within the rendered shading view the cool thing is that now you can click and drag anywhere on this tree to essentially paint it any way that you want let's return to the tool settings and remember we're still in texture paint mode and in this brush here there's tons of settings here for the radius the strength the color let's change the color to be like a darkish green that we want for the leaves and let's just craft drag all over this to paint it in rotate around a little bit and uh some of these clouds are really getting in the way which is a bit annoying so you may want to change to local view which you can simply by pressing the forward slash on your numpad on the keyboard that is essentially going to hide everything that you don't have selected if you press it again you're exiting local view but it just makes it really easy to focus on the thing that you're working on so now let's rotate around this tree and paint this up and the issue that i'm having right now is that i'm accidentally actually already painting the branch of this tree i really just want to paint in the leaves so one thing you can do while you're in texture paint mode you can select the parts of the model that you can actually paint on so you can exclude certain parts from accidentally being painted in order to do that at the top left hand side in the 3d view next to the texture paint drop down you've got this little option here to enable a paint mask let's click this option and nothing changes and that's because the paint mask is selected in edit view so let's once again press ctrl or command and tap and return to edit mode and now you can select the parts of the model that you want to paint on for that let's first come into the face selection mode which you can select from the top right here or you can just press number three on your keyboard let's press a a quickly to unselect everything and i'm just going to select a single face on this tree trunk and now you can go through and individually hold down shift and select every single face on this tree trunk which is going to be horribly tedious but because the trunk is actually a separate model from these four bunches of leaves you can press ctrl or command l to select everything that is linked to the pieces that you have already selected let's assume in select these two little branches as well again ctrl or command l to select everything that is linked so now i only have the trunk and the little branches selected ctrl or command tab to return back to texture paint mode and you can see that the leaves are now kind of faded out and if you try to paint them you can't actually paint them however you can still paint under the trunk itself and so you can isolate the pieces of the model that you can paint on now this looks more like a little plant rather than a tree because i painted the branch green rather than brown so let's come to the brush settings let's just select a darkish brown color and you can paint this up and kind of go in make sure you have all of the bits and pieces selected or over on the left hand side i like to use the fill tool as well so let's select the fill tool just click on our trunk and the trunk just went wide that's because the color changed when i switched over to the fill tool so let's go back to the color options and change that back to a brown let's again click on the trunk and yeah there you go let's just click on these little branches here as well so now the trunk is nice and dark brown what i'm going to do now is want to select the brush brighten up this brown a little bit make my brush a little bit smaller maybe not quite as strong and you can now kind of come in and paint highlights little details on it so like maybe this side is just a little bit brighter let's just make the radius a little bit smaller again so you can kind of draw details and highlights and different colors just to give these objects a little bit more variance for a lot of low poly modeling this detailing isn't required but you can literally paint textures and icons and anything you want onto your model this way cool let's just say the tree trunk is kind of as good as it's going to get with my lack of artistic skill so let's paint the leaves let's return to edit mode with control or command and tap enter edit mode and now i just want to select pieces of the leaf so let's just select the face on the top bunch here hold down shift and select one on each of these little blobs of leaves control or command and l to select everything that is linked so now we've got all of the bunches of leaves selected controller command and tab return to texture pane mode let's just come down in the brush and this time let's select a darkish green color select the fill tool and it's actually reset my color so let's go back to this dark ish green let's just click on the leaves there you go they're now nice and dark let me select the brush tool i'm going to brighten and just paint a few brighter spots into the leaves make the radius a little bit bigger and the strength down a little bit and it's going to paint a few highlight areas kind of here onto some of these leaves and just you know again you can kind of detail this out any way you want i'm not really going in with a lot of artistic skill or eye here i just want to give it a little bit of shape so it's not all so boring and uniform and let's just say yep i think i'm happy with this tree ctrl or command tab let's return to object mode and because we're still in local view everything else is hidden so forward slash on the numpad to exit local view let's unselect everything and we have now painted up our tree cool let's repeat the same thing for the rocks themselves and well as you select these you may notice and depending on how you created your model or where you downloaded it from some parts of your scene may actually be many different models and you could individually create uv maps for them individually create textures for them paint them and assign them but that can be quite tedious so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to join all of my rock elements into the same model i'm just going to kind of join them all together so i can paint them as a whole i'm going to do is i'm going to select all of the pieces for the rocks in my scene just drag around them and select them make sure you have all of them selected and then you can either come up into object and select to join or use the keyboard shortcut ctrl or command and j and that's going to join them all into the same mesh now they're still separate pieces but they're all joined together now into the same object here this is no longer an icon sphere this is really now the rocks but it's just one piece so now let's go into edit mode so control or command and tap select edit mode make sure everything is selected by pressing a and again we need to generate that uv map so let's select uv smart uv project simply hit ok let's zoom in over on the left hand side we still have the uv editor open and this is kind of it looks pretty ugly and it's not a nice uv map there's smarter and better ways to do this if you actually want to apply proper image textures but for texture painting you usually don't need to go into too much detail let's come over to the right side ctrl tab let's go into the texture paint mode and if you now click and drag over these rocks you may notice that you're actually painting on the tree you can see bits and pieces of that color now appearing on the tree that's ctrl and z or command and z undo all of that and that is happening because we are essentially using the geometry of the rocks but mapped to that tree texture because we still have the tree texture selected as what we're drawing on we want to create a new texture so click this little looks like a copy eigen but it's actually new image select that let's create a rocks texture hit okay and if you now click and drag as you can see we are already painting on the texture but we haven't assigned the material with that texture to the rocks just yet so let's come into the materials tab create a new material this one i'm going to call rocks material under the base color click on the yellow icon select image texture and now we should be able to select our rocks texture right here and there you can see it and we've already scribbled some ugly green right over that let's come back to our brush tools let's select the fill tool come down a little bit and this time i'm going to select maybe like a dark desaturated slightly blue gray color let's click on that to paint all of the rocks let's come back to the brush i'm going to change this over to a slightly brighter grayish color make that a little bit lower and again you can kind of just paint little details on a little bright splotches or other things that you want to have on your texture and again because this is a low poly model this isn't usually done but if you have a more detailed model and you want to really spend some time painting some nice details and nice textures on it this is kind of how you'd go about it now i kind of want these two rocks here to be a little bit brighter so i'm going to press ctrl command tab go into edit mode let's select a face on each of those pieces ctrl command l to select all of them together command on control and tab to go back into our texture paint mode so now only have those two pieces selected and maybe i'll go with a slightly brighter maybe a little bit more of a reddish color for those two let's increase the strength a little bit and well right now i can paint over everything that's because my paint mask is actually disabled so undo that let's enable the paint mask and you can see now they're the only things that are highlighted and i can actually paint on so now i can kind of paint over those two rocks let's just rotate around again i can use fill tools other things to just selectively paint only those pieces controller command let's return to object mode and there you go it's actually really nicely painted now i'm going to repeat this process here for the cloud but i'm going to speed this up there's nothing new here i'm just going in creating uv maps creating a new texture to paint on then i assign that to material that is assigned to the cloud so it shows up in rendered shading mode and then i'll just paint a little bit of color a little bit of white and bluish on those clouds and that's all there is to the fundamentals of texture painting in blender this is a super useful technique i use it a lot just to kind of rough colorize things in or give them a little bit more shape if you know just using a plain single color for my mesh is a little bit too boring now there's tons of other options especially with the brushes you can assign textures and patterns and stencils and all sorts of other advanced options if you want me to make some more tutorials just leave me some comments down below but i do hope that you enjoyed this introduction to texture painting and blender and that it'll help you make your models look a whole lot more interesting without a whole lot of effort and that is all there is to it if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button if you're new here hit that subscribe button and if you want to watch more just click these links over on the right hand side if you want to support me in what i do on this channel be sure to check out all of the links down in the video description and as always thank you very much for watching and until next time i will see you later

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 205,176

Rating: 4.9312167 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial, Texture Painting, Beginner, How to Texture Paint, UV Editor, How to use Materials, Blender 3D, Best Free 3D Program, Surfaced Studio, 3D Modelling, Paint Mask, How to Draw in Blender, Materials, Add Colour to Object, Local View, Introduction, How To, Help, Painting, Brush Tool, Fill Tool, EEVEE, Rendered Shading Mode, Select Linked, Modelling, How to select Faces, Join Object, How to Join Objects

Id: AnRQhH3fEDY

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020