Texture Painting in Blender for Beginners (Tutorial)

in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to get started with texture painting in blender now if you're a complete beginner to blender and you've never used blender before then i would definitely recommend watching my complete blender beginner tutorial series i'll leave a card right up on the screen for that but as long as you know just the basics of blender then you can definitely follow along with this tutorial huge thank you to sketchfab for sponsoring this video sketchfab is an awesome 3d model site where you can upload buy and sell 3d models and assets one of my favorite features of sketchfab is that you can upload and view your 3d models in your browser and even view them on your phone or tablet sketchfab also has a huge 3d model store where you can purchase 3d models and assets for your 3d work you can also apply to become a seller on the platform be sure to check out sketchfab with the links in the description so in this video i'm going to show you how to do texture painting and blender and we're going to be creating this mushroom scene right here by the end of the tutorial now before we get too far into this video i want to talk about drawing tablets because i think that using a drawing tablet for texture painting is pretty important now if you don't have a drawing tablet or can't get one then you can use a mouse and follow along with this tutorial but i'm going to be using a drawing tablet and i'd highly recommend that you use a drawing tablet if you're able to so in this video i'm going to be using my huion screen drawing tablet but you could also use something like a simple pad tablet like this now i definitely enjoy using a screen drawing tablet better than this little pad tablet but i think using a pad tablet like this is going to be way better than using a mouse because computer mice are really just made for going to a place on the screen and like clicking on buttons and things but you don't have a very good posture so it can actually be damaging to your arm or your wrist and with a drawing tablet you can make nice smooth strokes because you can kind of think of texture painting in blender sort of like digital painting or digital drawing because that's really what you're doing your digital painting a texture on to a 3d mesh and what's also really good about drawing tablets is that they have pen pressure so when you're trying to texture paint with a mouse you can just kind of click and drag but with a drawing tablet you can press down kind of lightly and then it will texture paint very lightly so it'll just very lightly put color onto your object or you can press down really hard and it's going to make a lot more color go on your object so having pen pressure is really helpful when you're doing texture painting so if you're interested in purchasing a drawing tablet i'm going to have amazon links in the video description to some tablets that i recommend so i'm going to have a link to this one actually i'm gonna have a link to a newer model of this one and i can highly recommend this one uh before i was able to afford a bigger screen drawing tablet i just bought this one and it's really great i used it for like two years and it still works and it's very high quality so i'll have a link in the video description to the newer model of this one and then also the screen drawing tablet that i use is the huion canvas gt191 now i've looked around on amazon and on huion's website and i can't really find anywhere to purchase it so i believe that the huion canvas gt191 is out of production so i'm going to leave a link to the hewing canvas 20 which i believe is a newer model i looked at the features and the size and everything and it looks very similar to my huion drawing tablet that i have right now but i believe the one that i have is just out of production so i'll leave a link to the newer models of both of the tablets that i have and those are amazon affiliate links as an amazon associate i earn from qualifying purchases but it won't cost you anything extra if you purchase something through those links all right now before we get started with texture painting we obviously need an object to texture paint on so i'm just really quick going to be modeling this basic mushroom and then we're also going to have to add seams and uv unwrap the mushroom before we start texture painting so here i am in blender and i'm going to actually close this timeline because i don't really need it so i'm going to click right up here pull up pull down and let go just to close that so we have a little bit more room and then also i have my screencast keys right down here so you can see what buttons i'm pressing all right so let's really quick model that mushroom before we get started with the texture painting so i'm going to press a to select everything and press x and delete i'm now going to press shift a and i'm going to add a circle now right behind me you can't really see it because it's behind me but the circle settings right here if you click on the little tab it's going to open up these settings the vertices here i'm going to set this to 12 and then close this and that way when i tap and edit but now you can see that there are 12 vertices around this circle so i'll press 1 on the number pad to go to front view now and i'm just going to start modeling this so i'll press f to fill the face and let me just press one on the number pad to go back into front view i'll press e to extrude and just extrude that up and then i can press s to scale and just make that a little bit thicker there all right now press e to extrude again bring that up s to scale make it a little bit smaller e to extrude s to scale and just kind of make that smaller and smaller as the stem of the mushroom comes up all right let's extrude that up again and this time we're going to start to scale it out so i'm going to extrude that up and scale that out and then we're going to have it coming down because we want the kind of part of the mushroom that kind of comes down and then kind of comes up so let's extrude it out again and this time we're going to extrude it down so e to extrude scale it down s to scale and then again e to extrude s to scale all right maybe bring that up a little bit and then let's extrude that up and out so s bring that out and then we'll extrude that up scale it down extrude that up scale it down and now we're making that kind of top round part of the mushroom okay bring that down all right there we go so now we just have our basic mushroom now i do want to play around with the shape a little bit because i don't really like some of the shapes here like this is a little bit too thin this is a little bit too thick so i'll hold down the alt key and select loops and then i can hold down the alt and shift key and select more loops and then i'll press s to scale and just kind of play around with the shape of our mushroom get it to how i like because i want to kind of thicken up some of these parts maybe thicken this up a little bit and then maybe move this up a little bit like that and then maybe scale that up okay let's see how that's looking okay so now i'm going to add the subdivision surface modifier you could go right up here to the modifiers panel add a subserve i'm going to press ctrl 2 and that is the shortcut key for the subdivision surface modifier okay there we go and then let's shade that smooth so object shade smooth okay and then if you want to you can just play around with the shapes a bit and kind of change them if you want to make anything a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller and then i think right down here i need to add a loop cut because i want to sharpen this up so it's not so round so i'll press ctrl r to add a loop cut click drag down and then click to place that and that way the bottom is going to be a little bit more sharp okay so i like how that's looking but it's just going straight up and i want it to be a little bit more random and not be exactly the same like going exactly up so i'm going to tab into edit mode press z move my mouse over and let go to go into wireframe and then i will press a to deselect everything press b and just box select this let go and then just press r to rotate g to grab and kind of rotate it so it's just just moving over a little bit okay and then also i can press three on the number pad or click right up here to go to the face select just select some faces and just kind of move it around kind of make some parts going down some parts going up and just make it a little bit more random because uh right now you know a mushroom wouldn't really be exactly the same you know it'd be a little kind of blobby some parts going up some parts going down just kind of making it more random and interesting all right that's looking pretty good so now i'm going to save my blender file so let's go file and click on save as and just save this somewhere on your computer i'm just going to call it mushroom.blend and save this blender file so now that we've finished modeling this we need to uv unwrap it because if we don't uv unwrap it then the texture doesn't know where to be placed on the object so let's go right up here and click on the uv editing tab and you can see that it gives us this different layout it's pretty similar but it has this uv editor right here now if we select everything we can press u and click on unwrap now when you do that nothing really happens actually it just uv unwraps everything kind of sticks it down here you can see if i press a to select everything g to grab there's actually a little point right there so this obviously isn't going to work so what we need to do is we need to add seams to cut out the mesh and then uv unwrap it so if you haven't done uv unwrapping before you can kind of think of it as your 3d object is a paper object and you're taking scissors and you're cutting out the mesh and then flattening it out and then it needs to be flat on the texture which is going to be right here so let's go ahead and do this so i'm going to press 1 to go to vertex select and first what i want to do is add a seam around here so that we can cut this top part and cut it off and that way it can open up and be flat so i'm going to hold down the alt key and select this loop now i can press u and that'll bring up the uv map settings and i can click right down here on mark scene now when you do this it adds this red line here but that's basically just telling it where you added those seams so now if i select everything press u again and click on unwrap you can see that now it's done definitely a better job so this top part right here it's uh uv unwrapped that and it's this side one over here so it's kind of flattened it out kind of opened it up right now it was kind of circular and then it kind of flattened out and opened up but this right here really isn't gonna work because uh you can see it gets really tiny there there's tons of detail and things are overlapping it's really messed up so this stem here we need to add a loop right through it and that way the stem can be cut open and open up so think about this being the mushroom stem if i were to cut a seam through it then the mushroom stem could open up flat so let's go ahead and do that so i'm going to press 1 again to go to the vertex select hold down the alt key and just select one of these loops and then the loop can just go down there that's that's totally fine and then it will go up here now it goes all the way through this and we don't really need to cut all the way through so i'm just going to press b for the box select and click with my middle mouse wheel and then let go and then a b for the box select middle click let go and that way we're going to deselect those vertices and then you could also just like hold down the shift key and select that and it's going to deselect the vertices so basically this loop needs to be going from this red line right here going all the way down through there and that way we can cut that open there will be one big piece that's opened up so now that we have that selected you can press u and then i'm going to click on mark scene okay so now we have a seam right down there let's double tap a to select everything again and i'll press u and we're gonna click on unwrap one more time and now that looks a lot better so this top part here is kind of a circle and then this this is the mushroom stem so these parts here are these kind of long parts right here and then that out there that's the inside of the mushroom you can see if i select the different points it's going to show it where it is on the uv map so for this object that is great and this is going to work great for the texture painting so if you just click right over here to the texture painting tab and go into texture pin you can see there's a few problems one thing if you try to click and drag it's not going to paint anything and you can see missing materials textures detected so what it's telling us is that we haven't added a material onto our object and so it's pink because it's telling us we haven't added a material you can also see that we haven't added a texture to paint on you can see there is a new button so we can add a texture but we haven't added a texture on here so we need to add a texture and then add a material onto this object before we can do the texture painting so let's go ahead and do that so let's go back to uv editing and then right here we're going to click on new now if you've made a texture for some reason you can't open that up i'm just going to click on new to make a texture so i'm going to click on new here you can make the name i'm gonna make the name mushroom color mushroom color okay now the width and height here this is how many pixels you can see px that's for pixels and right now the default is a 1k texture so if you've downloaded textures from like some different texture websites you may have noticed that you have download options between like 1k 2k 4k 8k uh the different resolutions of the texture now for this i actually want to do a 4k texture because 1k for texture painting this mushroom is pretty low quality so i want to texture paint with 4k now it really doesn't matter that much the width and height you could just changes to like oh i just want to have you know 000 pixels uh by 4000 pixels something like that and that would be totally fine but if you want to specifically make it like a 4k texture or a 2k texture or something uh you can do that so i just found a website online where it shows me the different resolutions for the different sizes of textures so a 1k texture which was the default was 1024 and that is a 1k texture now if you're wondering how i change these both at the same time you click on one drag down and then you let go and then you can change them at the same time i'm just going to escape that so a 1k texture is 1024 a 2k texture is 2048 now i want a 4k texture so the pixel amount for a 4k texture is 4096. so i could just type in right here 4096 like that but there's actually a easier way to do that what you can do is you can click drag down and then let go and that'll do both of them at the same time and then i can actually tell blender to times this by 4 so that the 1k texture is actually going to be 4k so what you do is you after you have the 1024 which is the default you click on this little star right here now for me on my keyboard the star is on the kind of top right of my keyboard kind of uh where the numpad is so you can just find it somewhere on your keyboard and that is going to tell it to times that number and then i want to be a 4k texture instead of a 1k texture so i'm going to type in 4 and then click on enter and you can see now it's made the texture by 4096 and that is the texture resolution for 4k textures but again it really doesn't matter too much if you wanted to you could just type in 4096 or you could just type in a random thing like 5000 pixels or something and then you'd know it'd be pretty high quality i am going to do a 4k texture though all right so that is the width and height the next one here is this color so the default is set to black and basically what this is is just the color that's on default so when you make the texture it'll just make the entire texture that color so what you should do is make this color what the majority of the texture is going to be so for this mushroom the base color is kind of going to be like a tan kind of light brown color so i'm going to make this a light color and then kind of make it over here kind of like a tannish kind of brownish slightly pink slightly orangey kind of color that's what i want for the base color of my mushroom so just something like that okay there we go i'm going to just do a color like that you can do whatever color you want and then these last settings down here i'm just going to leave these all a default so just leave these all how they are and then you can click on ok and it's going to make the texture so you can see it's just made a blank texture and this is a 4k image and then it's added the uv mapping onto the texture and so now when we texture paint on here or here the uv map is going to tell it where the texture is going to be placed on our object so now we just need to do one more thing we need to add a material to this object so to do that let's go over to the shading tab also let's go file and save just to save this project again okay now let's click on new here and i can just call this mushroom now right here there is the principal bsdf and on default the materials are all the principal bsdf and that works great it's a very realistic shader but i need to add that texture into the color so i'm gonna press shift a and i'm gonna search here for texture okay and just find the image texture it's down here you may need to actually type in image texture and then just click on that okay so drop that in now if you want to you could make textures right here by clicking on new and making a texture but we already made one in this blender file so you can just click right here and add the mushroom color now something to note here is if you save blender and then close it without saving this texture somewhere on your computer then blender is not going to save the texture so as soon as we're done texture painting we're going to need to save this texture to an image texture on our computer because yeah if you don't then blender will not keep it and you'll lose and you'll have to re-texture paint it so anyways click on the mushroom color and add this in and then we want to plug that up to the base color so it's contributing to the color so plug this in from the color to the base color and now you can see our mushroom is kind of this uh tan pinky orange color all right so now we are finally ready to do the texture painting so you can click right over here to the texture painting tab and it's gonna have it all set up for you all right so now we're in the texture painting layout and there is one more thing i want to do before i really get started with the texture painting you can see that here is our uv mapping and then here is our object now if you just start to click and drag around you can see we're texture painting on our object and that is really cool and then also you can texture paint on the flat image texture as well so if you like paint right here you can see there it is on our texture so both of these match up so wherever this is it's going to be over here so you can paint on either this side or this side usually i actually paint on the 3d object because that's a lot more intuitive but sometimes for certain things i might want to go ahead and texture paint on this now i'm going to ctrl z that because i want to undo this so something you may have noticed here is that there is a lot of extra space all this space right here isn't being optimized isn't being used and that's because when we uv unwrapped this it just put it right here and it didn't really optimize where the uv layout was so all of this space here we're kind of losing that data and we're not really using that texture space even though this is a 4k texture we're only using half of it so we can actually play around with where the uv mapping is so before we texture paint anything uh press ctrl z if you've texture painted anything let's go back to the uv editing tab and we can actually play around with where these uvs are placed so to play around with this i'm just going to press a to deselect everything and then i just want to select this so i'll press l with my mouse hovered over this island and it's going to select all the linked vertices so it's just going to select that island so now what i can do is i can press g to grab and r to rotate and s to scale just like if we were in the 3d view of blender g to grab r to rotate or s to scale so i can just bring this around and kind of optimize where it's placed so i'm going gonna kind of bring it up and kind of push it towards the edge okay like that and then i can also like scale this up a bit i think i'll move it over kind of like this and that way uh this circular texture can kind of be scaled up through there so just scale it up as big as you can and then press l to select this one s to scale and move it over now there's two things to note when you're doing this one thing is that you don't want this to be going outside of the texture because if you do then you can have issues with the texture another thing is that you don't want these to be overlapping because if they're overlapping then if you texture paint right here it's going to be textured painting on both areas so let me just show you the problem if i did that if i put this over and then i go to the texture painting tab and i start to texture paint it looks fine at first but you can see once i get here and right here is where i'm texture painting and it's overlapping this as i texture paint over here it's also adding it right here and that's because these are overlapping so i'm going to press ctrl z to undo that and then i'll go back to uv editing and just move this back so those are the two main things to be careful don't make this go over and don't make this go out of the texture but as long as you do both of those things you want this to be as big as possible so that you can use as much of the texture space that you have so that is a lot better now these are filling up most of the screen there is just a few little parts here and here that we're not using but that's okay you know we're not going to be able to use every single part like there's a little spot here we can't use but that's totally fine and these uv islands are a lot bigger now so we can really optimize and use that 4k texture that we added and get a lot more detail into our texture all right so now that we've done that let's go over to texture painting and that looks really great so we can just texture paint around and that looks really good so right now i'm just using my mouse i'm going to hop over to my screen drawing tablet because that's going to be really helpful for the texture painting and i'll go over the brushes and everything that we're going to be using all right so i've hopped over to my screen drawing tablet so my screen drawing tablet is right in front of me i've also got my pen and i've also got this little like drawing glove and this is really great for smoothly moving your hand across the screen i really like it it really helps so if you're doing texture painting with a drawing tablet which i would really recommend um how you navigate is going to be different depending on how you've set up your tablet like with your driver settings but i just have all my settings on default so i'll just show you what i do to navigate with most drawing tablets you're going to have a front and back pen button so if i just click and hold down my front pen button and just move along the screen don't click on the screen just kind of hover over the top of the screen as you click it's going to rotate the view then if i hold down the shift key as i hover over the screen and click with my front pen button it's going to pan the view and then if i hold down the control key as i hover my pen over the view and click with my front pen button it's going to zoom in and out so control click shift click and then just clicking is going to rotate around and again you can see my screencast keys right down here in the corner now to paint obviously you're just going to click and hold down that's going to paint along and what i really like about a drawing tablet is that you can have the pen pressure sensitivity so if i just press really lightly it'll be really light and then as i press harder it's going to make it stronger and stronger alright so you can paint in the 3d view as well as the 2d view but i prefer to paint in the 3d view most of the time so i'm just going to click right here drag over and then let go and just kind of minimize that kind of move it out of the way and that way we have more space to paint all right so let's go over the different brushes and tools so there are some tools here some tools up here and then also some tools over here so i'm going to go over this one first so if i just click and drag this panel out you can see it has some different stuff so there is the draw brush and this one is the default one this is what you're going to be using most of the time so it's just the basic draw brush there also is the soften brush so if i just make a very small stroke and then i go to the soften brush you can see that it's softening out those edges there we go that's a lot softer now also if you go to the smear brush which is going to smear things out pretty basic self-explanatory just going to smear that out now the clone brush kind of like a 2d software you may have used a clone brush in a 2d program these are all very standard tools in like a 2d software like or critter or photoshop or something the clone brush clones an area of your texture painting and how you tell it where to clone is the 3d cursor you need to place that 3d cursor where you want to clone so how you move the 3d cursor around is you hold down the control key and then just tap with your pen so hold down the ctrl key tap with your pen and that's going to move the 3d cursor and it's going to place it on the object so if i want to clone this and maybe clone it up here i could control click and then if i start to paint it's going to clone whatever that's seeing so now it's cloning where that is so i can just like clone there and so wherever the 3d cursor is that's where it's going to be cloning it and then also the fill brush if you just click on this and fill it you can see it's going to fill it and if i make this bigger you can see it's filled wherever the uv mapping is i'm going to just ctrl z that though now if you want to select colors you can right up here just change the different colors like if you want to paint blue or whatever colors you want to paint maybe red or whatever but if you want to select the same colors that you've been using like let's say i just want to change this all back to the tan color what you can do is you can hold down the s key and that's going to go to the color picker and then you can actually go anywhere on the screen where you want and you can just go right there to that and let go and now you can see it's that color if i hold down the s key again go right over the red now it's red s key and it's going to go to that color and now i can just texture paint that and just paint that away another way to do this is to click right here and then click on the eyedropper but if you do this it's going to just do what you can actually see so because there's some shading here in the 3d view it's actually going to make that really dark what you could do is click on this and then click on the eyedropper and then click on this right over here and that's going to be that color but just holding down the s key is really quick and easy all right so let's continue to talk about these different settings so these settings up here all of these settings up here they're actually the same settings as the settings right here so you can see right here there is this button this button is also right here there's the color and this color is right down here and there's the radius and strength and the radius and strength are right here so because these are the exact same as these i'm just going to be talking about these but they really are the same exact thing right up here so right at the top here there is these texture slots and we're just going to leave this at the default because we want to be in the material mode and then also there are some different maps so if you're texture painting multiple maps which we will do later in this video you can click on what map you want to paint but we're just painting with this mushroom color so we're just going to leave that how it is all right now if you go down here you can see there's brushes but there's also the brushes right here if you click on this there's only going to be one but i will be going over that later in this video and then let's go down here there is the radius and strength so the radius is how big your brush is so if you make it really small it's going to be smaller really big it's going to be a lot bigger brush the shortcut key to change this is to press the f key so if you press f it's going to change the brush you can just click and that will place that and you can press f again make it smaller and then click to place that so f is the shortcut key to change the size of your brush now the strength here that's pretty self-explanatory but that is basically the string so if i just make this like a red color you can see i can start to paint it's really strong if i want to make it less strong i can turn that way down or just change it right here and then i can paint and you can see that now it's very subtle and i have to paint over it many times to kind of get it nice and red i'm just going to control z that now the shortcut key for changing the strength of your brush is to press shift f so if you press shift f you can see it has a value here like point one point two point three all the way up to one and so that's gonna change this so shift f shift f and that's gonna change the strength of your brush now right down here the color uh that's the same color as this so you can just change that color here and then there are a lot more settings down here but i don't want to go over all the settings because this is a beginner tutorial so i just want to go over the basic things that you need to know and the things that you're going to be using the most and then one more thing i did want to show you there is this symmetry right here if you turn this on you could like turn on mirror x if you do this now you can see that it's going to be mirroring it on the other side so if you're like texture painting a character's face you may want to use this if you want to have it be the same on either side but because i'm textured painting a mushroom i don't really want to do this i'm going to turn this off all right so let's finally get into the texture painting so if you want to you could grab some reference images and like put them on a different monitor i have some reference images of some different mushrooms and stuff uh but yeah let's just get started with this texture painting so i'm going to just press ctrl s to save my file again and then let's start so i'll make my brush a little bit bigger with f and just start to texture paint this on so i'm just going to have the top part be all red and then the bottom part here i'm going to leave as that color but i will add some uh interesting texture to the bottom here but the top here i want to be all red of course you can make whatever color mushroom you want some mushrooms are just like brown and some mushrooms might be like slightly blue or slightly more brown i'm going to make one of those classic red mushrooms so i'm just going along here and texture painting the red for that and then once we get kind of here to the bottom we're going to have this slowly fade away so i'm just pressing down on my tablet and painting and then i'm just clicking with my front pen button moving over and then pressing down again and painting clicking with my front mouse button moving over i mean front pen button moving over and then just continuing to paint all right and then right here as it kind of starts to get into the bottom part i'm going to paint lighter so i'm not going to press as hard and that way it's not going to be quite as strong all right just make this bottom part a little bit more red but i'm about done with the first part and remember that if you close blender before you save your image then it's going to not save your texture paint you're going to have to repaint so after we're done with this i will show you how to save your image all right i'm going to call that good now for some reason there's a little bit of red part right there so i'm just going to press s let go and then just paint over that okay there we go so now i want to paint some little white dots on the top of our mushroom so i'm going to click right up here or just click right up here and i'm going to change this to rgb and then just turn these all the way up to 1 and that way it's just going to be a pure white color then i can press f to make my brush smaller and then just start to paint around here and make some little circles add a nice little texture to that mushroom and just go around here add some random little dots there you can make them bigger if you wanted to some mushrooms like have bigger ones but this is kind of stylized this could be used for maybe like a game asset or something so again i'm just clicking with my front pen button to move around and then just uh pressing down on the tablet just going around in circles to make those little white circles okay and we're almost done here make a few more now if i hold down the ctrl key and click i can zoom out and then look around okay and that looks pretty good so now i want to add some texture right down here underneath it so i'm going to make this a like a dark brown color maybe even a little bit darker and i'm going to go along here just kind of make a texture in here making some little darker areas just kind of making some darker lines in there and you can see that as i'm painting it's adding it in right there so you can see if i paint look right up here you can see that as i'm painting it's adding it in right there make this smaller again because i don't really want to look at this okay now i think i'll change the strength way down so just grab that strength make it way down make my brush a little bit bigger by pressing f and then clicking and then i'll just go along here and just tap a little bit to just make this whole thing a little bit darker maybe just go around here too and make just this underside of the mushroom just make it all darker so i'm just lightly going around along here just making that darker okay and then on the bottom here i kind of want that to be darker too so i will hold down the shift key and click to move down hold down the control key and click to move up and then just press down on the tablet and we're just going to go along here and just make this a little bit darker as well and also right down here on the bottom probably make that darker too all right there we go that's looking pretty cool so i want to add some more texture in here i want to add like some little uh kind of like cracks or something so i'll press f make my brush smaller turn the strength up a little bit more but i still want to be kind of subtle and i'm just going to start to paint along here i think i'll make this even a darker color and the strength turn that up quite a bit more i'm just going to go along here and start to make a cool texture down here now you can see that as i'm painting depending on how hard i press it is changing the strength but it's not changing the size of the brush and that's because these settings this setting is turned on but this one is turned off so if you turn this on it's going to change the strength by how hard you press it if i turn this off now it doesn't really matter if i press lightly or hard it's not going to change anything and the same thing is for this so if i turn the radius on make this bigger if i press really lightly the radius is going to be small and then if i press really hard you can see that now the radius is a lot bigger so that's another really good feature using the pen pressure sensitivity so i actually want to turn these both on and that way i can press really lightly and it'll be smaller and then if i press down harder it's going to make it thicker so i can make it kind of be thin here and then as it goes down it's going to get thicker and thicker it just gives a really nice look so i'm gonna do that so basically just making whatever texture you want you really don't have to do what i'm doing you can make whatever you want uh get some reference images or if you had a certain mushroom in mind kind of the look of some kind of mushroom you can paint it like that i'm just going to go along here and add this kind of texture in here also i'm going to add some little cracks or something in here some little kind of swirly parts okay just going along there kind of thickening it up in the middle maybe up here as well i'm gonna add in a bit of a texture there i'm not gonna show the entire thing because i'm really just doing the same thing i'm just kind of going along here so i'm going to kind of uh cut through this in the video editing there's not really any point in showing the entire thing but if you want you can just kind of pause the video and just finish this up all right i like how that is looking so i added in this kind of texture right here kind of swirly bits coming up and then just kind of along these stem i added some little things in there and then on the top here as well i added in some little bits right in there so a few more things that i want to do i want to add some parts that are a bit lighter so i'm going to hold down the s key get this just grab that color and then just pop it up make it a bit lighter make it a little less saturated so it's a pretty bright color now what i can do is i can go along some of these areas so the first thing i want to do is go along the lighter parts down here so i'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger just kind of go along there and make those inner parts lighter so there's some parts that are darker and then some parts that are lighter so i'm just going to go along there and that'll give it more contrast and make it look more interesting and then i will probably use the smooth brush and kind of smooth out a few of these things after we're done okay i'm going to go to the soften brush and just try that so i'm just gonna go in here the softener brush does seem to lag up a little bit uh you can see how laggy it is but i'm just gonna go along and smooth out some of these areas you could also try the smear brush to kind of smooth things out a bit all right i am good with that okay so let's uh press the s key again and kind of grab that color and then i need to go back to the draw brush just grab that light color maybe make that a bit brighter and then what i want to do is make my brush really small and go in here and next to those dark areas i want to make some light parts and i think i want to be even brighter just going to go along here make some light areas and that will kind of give the effect that these parts right here are kind of popping in so there's kind of like an area where it's kind of darker and then a little side part where it's kind of being lit up so it kind of gives the look as though this is kind of cutting in a little bit so i'm just going to go around to some of these areas maybe add a few little lighter parts there as well you can see that it's starting to get a bit low quality here and that's because right here if i just zoom in here this is being pretty squished and so this is where our uv map could have been a little bit better but you can see because this is so small you can see the pixels so two ways to fix this one way would be to unwrap this a bit better so that's a little bit bigger another way would be to turn up the texture resolution but it's pretty small it's just kind of just a small little part and we are going to be looking at the mushroom from like this far away so it's really hard to notice that from that far away okay let's keep going here so just going to make some lighter areas okay almost done i'm just going around to some of these not all of them but just some of them adding that kind of white part and also down here adding just some streaks of white or lighter areas all right let's just uh zoom out there and take a look at that i think that's pretty cool now something else that i want to do is i want to make some parts kind of like the part right up here a little bit more yellowy orange so i'm going to change this color to a bright kind of yellow orange color kind of like that okay press f and make my brush really big and then turn the strength way down and then i'm just going to kind of tap along here and for something like this i'm going to turn off the size changing so right here i'm going to click on this and that way it's only going to be that size it's not going to be affected by how hard i press so just go along here i'm just going to make that a little bit more yellow it kind of gives a nice look now because we painted the white dots on there before this it is making those dots yellow but we will go ahead and fix that in just a moment okay so that is good now i'm going to change this back to white so i'm going to click on this go to the red green and blue and just pull these all the way up to one so that it's pure white and then i need to press f and make my brush smaller and then just go back along here and just paint that white back in i need to turn the strength way up because the strength is way too small there we go so just paint that back in i just forgot about that but i did want to add that in that little yellow kind of area on the top i think it just gives a nice look just going around here repainting in that white okay i need to do this one and i think that's it okay there we go now i also want to show you how to add a bunch of kind of little dots a little uh texture and detail on the sides of the mushroom here so to add in little dots a little black dots what you could do is make the color to black and then press f and make your brush really small and then just go along here and tap you can see that when i tap it's just adding in the little dots there but a quicker way to do this if i just ctrl z that a quicker way to do this is to change some of these settings that it does automatically so what you can do is i want to actually duplicate this because i may want to come back to the original brush so to duplicate this texture i'm going to click on this uh kind of file icon and that's going to duplicate it so now there's a second one if i click on this here is our default one here's our second one now i want to change the name so i can click on this and change the name to dots okay so now we have the normal one and then we have dots so now that we have dots i'm going to go down here just click and drag down and i'm going to open up the stroke right here and on the stroke right here there's some different settings this jitter if you turn this all the way up to 2 now if you click and drag see what it's doing it's just kind of making the instead of just making dots because if this is turned all the way down to zero what it's actually doing when you're drawing is making a ton of little dots but they're so close to each other that it looks like one line if you turn the spacing up here this spacing value if you turn this way up you can see that now as you paint this is basically what it's doing so it's actually making a bunch of little dots and if you want to have like some dotted lines this would be a great way to do that but when the spacing is way down so if i just ctrl z this if the spacing is way down to the default which is uh ten percent now that that is ten percent when you draw it doesn't look like they're little dots it looks like it's one line but really they are dots just really close together so i'm going to turn the jitter amount all the way up and that way it's going to be more jittery now the spacing you could also turn this spacing up and that way there's not going to be as many dots because uh there we go now there's a lot less dots because if you turn this way down there's just so many dots they're kind of overlapping with each other so i'm gonna turn the spacing up a little bit and then turn the jitter up to two so that gives a really cool effect now if i make my brush a little bit bigger and just start to paint in here you can see that it's adding in those little dots there and i can just go along here maybe make my brush a little bit smaller and it's just going to add those dots there in the texture so that gives a really cool look i really like how that looks so i'm just going to go along here kind of make it random a few little pieces coming up some parts going down here i'm just going to go along this and add some little dots there into the texture and then also right down here i think it might be cool to add some dots in here so i'm going to do the same thing and of course you could change the color if you wanted to so if you want to have a different color of dots you could change that uh color i'm just going to have them black because i want them to be black dots also i think i'll just add a few down here on the stem i think it looks pretty cool all right there we go so i'm going to call that good for the texture painting so that looks really cool i really like all that detail in there those little cracks that we added uh looks really nice so if i go back to the layout here and i press z move my mouse up and go into rendered view i'm in cycles render right now and so it's just all gray if i press z and move my mouse down you can go to the material preview and you can see how that's looking as well i want to go into cycles render though so i'm going to press z move my mouse up and go into rendered view but because this is all gray i'm going to add it in hdri to get some more realistic lighting so you totally don't have to do this if you don't want to but i'm just going to quickly add an hdri so let me click right here on the world and then right here i'm going to click on this and go to environment texture and then i'm going to click on open now i've downloaded this really cool forest slope 1k hdri on hdri haven i'll leave a link in the video description if you'd like to download the same hdri that i'm using if you haven't heard about hdri haven it's a really awesome website where you can download free hdr eyes so i'm just gonna double click on this to add this in and now you can see our mushroom has some really nice lighting so let's go over to the shading tab right up here and then let's go into rendered mode so you can see because that texture there was plugged in it's lighting that up now remember how i said that if you close blender and you don't save the texture it's not going to save it so we need to save our texture so let's click over on uv editing and here is the texture that's pretty cool if i tap into object mode you can see there is our texture map so i need to save this so to save it you go image right up here and then click on save as and i'm just going to save this with my other files just save it as a png that's totally fine as mushroom color png and just click on save as image okay so now that we've saved that if we close blender and open it back up we're not going to lose this because now it's saved somewhere on your computer so blender can now have access to it alright so let's go over to the shading tab now you can just be done here with the color but i still have a few more things that i want to show you because i also want to show you how to texture paint normal maps so if you want to have a certain part of the texture that's kind of like bumping in or bumping out i'm going to show you how to do that as well so how you do this is you're going to need to add a new texture map so press shift a here and i'm going to search for an image texture drop the image texture right down here and then we don't want to use the same one that we're using the mushroom color we want to add a new image so i can click on new right here and i want the width and height to be 4k so that's fine the color here because i want to paint a bump map or a normal map i want this to be completely gray and that way when we paint darker later it's going to be bumping it in or out so i'm going to change this to rgb and just make these all to one and then i'll just pull this down and that'll make it more gray and i'm just going to have it kind of in the center there and then the name here i'm going to call it mushroom uh bump mushroom bump okay and then click on okay and now we've added that in now just like the other texture if you don't save this it's going to forget it and so you're gonna have to add a new one in when you close your bunda file so if you close your blender file before saving this then it won't remember the texture and you'll lose it so just remember that after you're done with this you're going to have to save your file and we will go ahead and do that so before we start texture painting again i need to plug this color here up to the normal and you can see that when we do that there's some really weird shading issues that's because we need to convert this to normal data so there's this color here and this is yellow that little yellow dot there and this is purple because it's using normal or bump so we need to add a note here to convert it so that the principle shader can use it so we need to press shift a and i'm going to search right up here for a bump node just drop the bump node right in here and then because this is just a black and white image we need to take this normal and plug it up to the height so the color is going to the height and the bump is going through the normal now you may have not really noticed any change and that's because we haven't really texture painted anything yet so let's go ahead and do that so i'm going to click back on the texture painting tab right here and you can see that it's all gray now if it's not all gray just uh move up here and you can see that there is the different maps that we added so there's mushroom color and there's mushroom bump so if you want to paint the color again if you want to keep on working on this you can click on the color if you want to paint the bump map you can click on the bump map and you can edit that and then you can see that just like the other one the uv editing is going to be the same so it doesn't really matter which one you're using the uv editing is going to be the same now while we're texture painting this you could just leave it at gray and texture paint and it looks like we're still using that dots there so i'm going to go right here click on the dots and change this to the text draw there we go so you could texture paint this like this and just know that like where your texture painting it's going to be going in but a really cool way to do this is to go into the material preview so if you press z and move your mouse down and let go that's going to go into the material preview and it's going to show you a preview of the material and now if you texture paint instead of showing that black and white you can see that it's actually going to cut in the mesh so you can see it's actually using that bump map and because we plugged the bump map in to the principal bsdf it's automatically giving us a preview of what that looks like as we scold so you can see if i make this black and then paint you can see that it's going to be painting in so it looks like it's kind of going in if i change this to white and paint you can see that now it's bumping out so this one is going in and this one is going out so let's just change this to black and i'm also going to turn on this button right here which again makes it so that as the harder we press the bigger the brush is going to be so now that i have that turned on i can start to cut away here and make some places where i want to be bigger or smaller and so i'm just going to go along here cut that in okay and then also if you zoom in here you can see that some places are a little bit rough if you want to soften that you can click on a soften brush and kind of soften that up just go along there and smooth that out i'm going to go back to the draw brush now and just start to do that so a few areas here where you want it to be going in or look like there's kind of a crack or something going in there you can do that so let's just go along here maybe some areas here i want to do that and i think i'll turn the strength down and do that again because i don't want to be too strong maybe turn the strength down a little bit more okay so i'm just going to go along here and add in that normal map so basically just doing the same thing but any place that you want to be carving in uh you can just draw that or paint that it really does look quite cool kind of bumps out the mesh and then also these darker areas i want those to be going in so i'm going to paint there and just kind of paint along those darker areas to make it look like they're going in just on those darker areas the lighter areas i'll actually want to have them popping out all right and then i want to have a little bit of like creases in the side of the mushroom maybe some little cracks or something so i'm just going to go along here and just make some little cracks i think that looks kind of cool yeah i think that looks pretty cool go along there and then have it go through and then back in there also you may want to just do some little cracks like that if you wanted to just making a few little cracks there i think that does look pretty cool making it thicker down here and then thinner as it kind of goes up if you watched my sci-fi robot drone tutorial series i do something similar to this um in that series where i make some different like little bolts and like little metal plating on the robot and i use this technique to kind of carve in where i want those those different plates to be so i do that for the normal map in that tutorial all right so now that we've done that i'm going to have some parts coming out so to make some parts coming out it's going to be white so change this all the way to white and now we can just make some parts popping out so maybe i'll do some parts in here as well just some little bits coming out okay right down here below the mushroom i'm gonna have some parts coming out here as well right there right there okay just going along there and then i will smooth that out a little bit when we're done okay and then i want to smooth that out so i'll go to the soften brush and kind of smooth that out the thing about the soften brush is it seems to be so subtle that it doesn't really seem to do too much i mean it does stuff but not a ton i'm gonna go to the smear brush and just try to smear that a little bit all right that's gonna be good so now what i want to do is right up here these white little parts i want to make this kind of popping out so go to the draw brush and make sure you have the white and then if you just start to go along here and you can see that as i'm painting that now it kind of looks like that's popping out it's kind of hard to see here but if i go right there you can kind of see that so if you zoom way in here again you can kind of see the pixels so if you want to make a higher texture than 4k you could but really from this far away you're not even going to be able to see that uh when it's rendered out so i'm just going along here kind of popping that out so that those little white parts look like they are popping out of the texture these details are also the type of thing that you could sculpt um but texture painting is really cool as well if you want to watch my complete blender beginner sculpting tutorial there will be a card right up on the screen there and you can check that out as well and then if you wanted to you could go to the soften brush and kind of soften that up a little bit all right there we go and i'm going to call that good so let's go back to the shading here and we can see what that's looking like all right that's looking really cool now one thing that you could do if you wanted to i don't really do this very much when i'm doing texture painting but if you wanted to you could do basically the same exact thing but plug it into the roughness so if you wanted to you could add a new image texture and then click on new and then make a new gray texture and then plug this into the roughness and then when you go in and paint when you paint black and white it's going to make it more rough or more shiny now for this i just want it to be a little bit more shiny so the roughness i'm going to pull this down a little bit to make the mushroom a little bit more shiny all right and then again we need to save this map because if we don't save it and we close blender then we're going to lose it so let's go back to the uv editing and then right here you can see here is our mushroom color if you click on this this drop down you can change to mushroom bump and now you can see this is our bump so basically wherever it was darker that's where it's going to be going in and wherever it's lighter it's going to be popping out so i'm going to go image and then click on save as and then i'll just save this as mushroom bump with my other texture map and just save that okay now we are good to go so this is really the basics of how to do texture painting in blender there is one thing that i want to show you though and that is how to use the stencil brush so basically if you have a texture like an image texture or something and you want to paint that onto your texture you can use a stencil and actually paint that image onto an object so what i'm going to do is i'm going to model a basic ground and then i found uh this free image on pixabay if you'd like to download this image there will be a link in the description for that this is just kind of like a cartoony dirt texture and i thought this would look cool for the ground so i'm going to show you how to texture paint this onto an object and if you want to use a different texture that's totally fine you can do whatever you want or you can skip this step if you're not interested but now i'll just show you how to add this texture onto an object in blender so before we add this on we're just going to need to model a basic ground so i'm going to press shift c to center my 3d cursor to the center of the scene there and then i'll press shift a and i'm going to go to mesh and i'm going to add a circle and then i will scale this circle up tab into edit mode i'm going to press 1 to go to the vertex select and then press f to fill that face then i need to press g and z and bring this down then i'll press e to extrude e to extrude s to scale e to extrude s to scale we're basically just making a very simple ground i'm also going to press i to inset that and then maybe move this down a little bit okay i'm going to press ctrl 2 to add a subdivision surface and then we can go object and just shade that object smooth and then i think i'll also press ctrl r click and drag down to add a loop cut all right so just like the mushroom we're going to need to add seams those little red things there so that we can cut out this object so let's tab into edit mode i'm going to hold down the alt key and select this loop and then hold down the shift and alt key and select this loop so now this can be cut and open up and then this can be cut too so now i can press u and i can click on mark seam and there we go now it's added a seam down there and all the way around press a again and press u and click on unwrap now when we do that let's click over on the uv editing to make sure that looks good and yeah that looks great now again there's all this space wasted so i'm going to press a to select everything r to rotate g to grab and then s to scale and just make that a little bit bigger but just make sure your uv layout is inside the texture now you can see this is not the texture that we want because this is our mushroom bump so i'm going to press x and that'll close it it's still within blender but i'm just closing it from this view and then i'll click on new now this one i'm going to change to ground so just name it ground and then again i want to be a 4k texture that's fine and then the color here doesn't really matter uh but i'm just going to make it a brown color okay and then we can click on ok so now it's added that and if i tap into edit mode there we go it's on the texture now so remember just like we did for the mushroom we need to add a material to this so let's click over on the shading tab and then right down here we need to click on new and i'm going to call this ground i'll press shift a now and i'm going to click on the search here and i'm going to search for an image texture drop the image texture right here we're going to click on this drop-down menu right here and add our ground that we just added and then the color needs to go up to the base color so now we can see that ground texture on our object so let's go into the texture painting mode now and then click right up here on the draw brush and if i start to paint now you can see it's working just like the other object all right so now i'm going to show you how to add that texture so what we need to do is we need to duplicate this so i'm going to click on this to duplicate it and now we have three so we have the text draw the dots and then the other one that we just added if you click right here to rename it i can call it ground so i'm gonna call it ground okay so now we have three of them but we're gonna use the ground one i'm gonna go down here and i'm just gonna leave it to pure white so just turn it all the way up to white if you if it's not set to white you can click on this here make sure it's at rgb and then turn these all up to 1 and then it will be pure white alright so to add the texture in we need to go down here to the texturing tab and click on new now if you click on this you can see we've just added in one texture so there it is but we haven't actually told it what texture to use so it's just black right now so to add a texture in we need to click right down here to the texturing panel and then if you look up here you can see this is set to brush that's what we want because we want to add the texture to the brush and then right here it's just black because we haven't added anything so right now right here it says image or movie we want to use the imager movie so then right here we can click on open and import that texture so just click on open and then just locate to wherever you save the texture so i'm just going to double click on it to add it in so there we go now we have our texture right in there and we can go back right up here to our brush settings so now that we've added that in if you look down here you can see there is our texture now right now the mapping is set to tiled if you start to paint you can see that it is adding that in but because it's just tiling it you can't really control where it is and it's just texture painting it on all around what i want to do is this tile here i want to change it if i just go up here click on this i want to change it to stencil now if i move my mouse over here you can notice that the texture is actually being previewed on our 3d view so what we can do is we can move this around and then when we texture paint on it it's going to place that texture onto our object so how to move this around is you click with your back pen button so just click with your back pen button that's going to move that around and then if you want to scale it you're going to hold down the shift key and right pen button and if you want to rotate it you're going to hold down control and do the back pen button so i'm just going to make this really nice and big and zoom in here and now what i can do is i can start to paint and when i paint you can see that where the texture is if i move away you can see now it's placed that onto our object so it's really cool the stencil is really nice you can just go around here and start to paint so just move around also if you want to like make it a little bit different hold down the ctrl key rotate it you can also scale it if you wanted to yeah and just start to paint all around here and just see how it's looking now the strength is really small so it's kind of overlapping a lot so i'm going to turn the strength all the way up to 1 and then when i paint it's going to be a lot stronger so i'll just do that and then let's just go around here and add in that really cool rock dirt texture and then to make it look different again you can hold down the control key or the shift key and then click with the back pen button you can scale it or rotate it and we're almost done this didn't take very long because it is pretty big so very quickly just add that in now on the bottom here if you want to add that in for the bottom let's just go ahead and do that so i'll just paint that in you can also make your brush bigger by pressing f to make your brush pretty big and just paint that all in go along on the sides here because there are little bits uh right there there's a little bit that we didn't quite paint so you can just go along here just kind of lightly paint that in until you can't see it all right there we go uh that was pretty easy and it looks pretty cool all right and then one last thing before we finish this remember to save your image because again if you don't save this image and you just close it you're going to lose your texture paint so go back to the uv editing here and then make sure you selected the ground and there it is and then you can go image and click on save as and again i'm just going to save it with my other files as ground dot png i'm going to click right up here and change this back to the text draw which is just the basic one and let's go back into layout here and we can just go into rendered mode to see the final thing so now that we're done with the texture painting i'm going to hop back over to my main monitor alright so here we are now before we finish i just thought i would do a little bit of stuff to make this look a little bit nicer so one thing that i want to do is add a light so i'll just press shift a go down here to light and just add an area light i'll just rotate this area light and bring it up just kind of point it at the mushroom go into rendered mode see how that's looking now let's go to the settings for the light and i just want to make it a lot brighter and then right now the shape is set to square i want to change it to a rectangle and then just make that size a lot bigger there we go so we have a nice bright big light shining on our mushroom maybe they make that a bit brighter also let me change the color a little bit maybe make it just a little bit yellow let's go back to the shading tab all right now something that i want to do is play around with these colors a little bit just to make it a little bit stronger so i'm going to press shift a here search for an rgb curves then just drop the rgb curves right here and then if i just kind of pull this up it's going to make everything lighter and if i pull this down and make another one it's going to make everything a little bit more contrasty so you can see now that ground is a lot sharper let's go back to the layout now and i'm just going to select this light i think i might duplicate it and just rotate it over to kind of have a bit of a rim light something like that all right and then let's add a camera so i'm going to press shift a and just add a camera right here and then what you can do is you can just move to where you want the camera to be so i just want the camera to be somewhere right there and then i'm going to press ctrl alt numpad 0 so control alt number pad 0 is going to bring the camera to wherever we are and then with the camera selected you can press g to move the camera around uh if you want to move the camera in you can press g and double tap z just kind of move it in there and then i'll just press z and move my mouse down to go into the material preview and i just want to duplicate these so i'll press shift d to duplicate s to scale r to rotate and really i'm just making a basic little scene you can do whatever you want so i'm just going to add a mushroom right there another one and then i think i'll duplicate this one more time you can double tap r and that'll track ball rotate your object just kind of rotate it maybe i'll make this one a little bit bigger and then one last thing that you can do to make this image look really nice is to add a depth of field so if you select the camera and just go to the camera settings right here there's the depth of field you can turn this on and then the focus object you can click on the eyedropper and then just click on the circle which is the mushroom and then this f-stop value if you just change this you can see that as we turn it down it's going to get more and more blurry but this still stays in focus so really just get it to wherever you like i'm just going to go with a 0.1 i think that looks pretty good and then i'll just hit f12 to render out the final image all right so there we go so that is gonna be it for this texture painting beginner tutorial so i hope this tutorial was helpful i hope it was a good introduction for learning how to do texture painting in blender and again if you'd like to purchase these project files and also help to support me there will be links to my gumroad and patreon where you can purchase these project files thank you so much for watching and i will see you in a future tutorial

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 67,100

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Art, mushroom, hand painted, blender, 3d, art, ryanking, ryankingart, texture, painting, beginner, tutorial

Id: 4d4N8d4ki2Y

Length: 64min 20sec (3860 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021