Texture Painting in Blender for Complete Beginners

in this video i'll show you how to get started with texture painting as a complete beginner in blender i've created a free model for you guys to download so you can follow along with this video it's available on my patreon for free with the link in the description down below alright so if you open this up you will see one of my favorite game assets ever and that's the master sword from my favorite game the legend of zelda wind waker it's a very low poly model contains only about 600 words and it's perfect for creating a texture paint material now before we can get started we need to do two things first of all we need to create a uv map and second of all we need to create a blank canvas for us to paint on so let's hop on over to the ue editing workspace and let's get started on creating our uv map now on the right side here you will see our model which we are now in edit mode of and on the left side here you will see our uv map which is now a mess because it's not unwrapped yet so we need to unwrap the model here now there's two ways we can go about this the first way is to do everything manually and you would do this by maybe going into edge select selecting edges on this model then hitting ctrl e marking them as a seam selecting everything hitting u and unwrapping it now this will unwrap the model based on the cuts which are the seams that you specified on the model it does a decent job with only one seam important to note in this case is that on this side we can actually check how our uvs are looking if we go up here and we click on this drop down and we enable display stretch it will show the stretch for our uvs now dark blue basically means no stretching at all green or red depending on wherever you take this the further you stretch it the redder it will become basically means stretching so you want everything to be as blue as possible now you can see there's a lot of stretching going on and that's because we haven't properly unwrapped it like i said the most manual way but also the way with the most control is to go ahead and add in seams everywhere on this model but it might be a little bit tedious and in this case we have a pretty simple model and it won't be necessary for us to do that so instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to clear the seam so hit ctrl e clear scene and i'm going to hit u again and choose smart uv project now this is a built-in unwrap function for blender which automatically does a lot of the work for you now there's two settings that we need to change in here which are the island margin and the area weight the island margin is the area between islands now an island is basically one of these sets of linked uvs so our blade here is a island or our guard is an island these are almost touching everywhere and that's not something that we want because when we are texture painting we don't want these to overlap at all so we don't get any bleed going on between our objects here so what we need to do is we need to increase this island margin to create some space between all of these islands so i'm going to set it to 0.05 and finally we have this area weight here now hover over it and i'll give you this tool tip to show you what it does basically it respects the larger areas of your model so in this case we have this blade here with the guard there these are large areas and they will need more texture detail to get a proper look and that's why they should be bigger within our uv map so if we increase this value it will respect these face areas a little bit more and make them larger within our final uv map i'm going to set this to 0.1 i'm just going to hit ok we have a complete unwrap now and this looks perfectly fine for this model it's not perfect in any sense but yeah it could be better but does it need to be no this is good enough all right so with our uv map out of the way let's hop on over to the next workspace which is texture painting this exists out of two windows on the left side we have our uvs again and on the right side we have our model in a 3d texture paint workspace which is now completely pink basically meaning we are lacking a texture and just like it would be pink if you added in an image texture in the regular shader notes but didn't provide an actual image there so before we start creating a canvas or basically a material i'm going to change the viewport shading here which is now set to studio shading which gets you all of these shadows and stuff but i want it to be flat because there's no additional lighting messing up how things look so this will be an exact representation of our texture paint material all right so next up what we need to do is we need to create an actual material to work with so on this right side here we have all of our active tool settings now we are going to go here to node textures and click on the plus icon to add in a new texture in this case i'm going to add in a base color texture because that's all i'm going to use for this model but you could go ahead and add in a metallic roughness bump displacement anything you want to create a hand-painted pbr texture so physically based rendering texture as well now in this case i'm going for a stylized look so just using a base color only is perfectly fine now i'm going to increase the size to be 2k which in texture land is 2048 by 2048 you could go up to 4k which is 4096 but it might be a little bit overkill for this type of model 2k is probably even overkill and we are going to disable this alpha here and give it a color that you want in this case the default fill color which is a light gray is perfectly fine so let's hit okay now you will see that we now have an active texture to actually paint on master sword low poly base color and if we just take a color here and we draw voila we can now draw on our object here when you do this these edges are not getting painted on and that's because these edges are too sharp and the way this brush works is that wherever you are viewing this object from it will look at that object and define angles of certain faces if they are too sharp it won't let you draw on them now that's a bad thing because this low poly model has a lot of sharp edges so i'm going to go down here into falloff and let's disable this normal falloff function now if we draw you can see we can perfectly fine draw anywhere on our sword model here now on the left side we still only see our uvs and we don't see any of this actual texture and that's because we haven't selected it if you will so if we go up here and click on the image icon there we can actually select our texture and it will now be visible as well here and we can actually draw on this side as well so i can just draw here and it will reflect that on this object over here it works however if faces are unlinked for example the face on this side which is this face over here has been cut away using the smart uv project tool so it's usually a little bit better to actually draw in here but sometimes you could manually add in stuff on the left side as well it's nice to have a representation of how things look on the left side here all right so the next thing i want to show you is how to use all of these tools so like i showed you before we have the texture draw which is just drawing on your object now we can increase and decrease the brush size by hitting f moving our mouse until we get the desired brush size and just clicking and we can now draw in a smaller fashion something like that now there's also a strength value which is up here and we can actually change this one with shift f the strength is one or strength is lower and whatever you set it to you can change it over here and change it back just like you change the actual radius brush the final thing that's very handy to know is that if you press s you will get a color picker tool by just hitting s hovering over something and then letting go of s it will change it to this color so you can now draw in a different color for example this one so those are the three functions that you should know for every brush within our texture painting workspace now we have different types of brushes here we also have this soften brush over here we have quite a crisp line and if we want to soften this up we can actually use the soften brush and just drag it over and it will sort of blur it out it's a very handy tool and you will use it a lot for softening pen strokes that are easily visible to the eye making it look too unnaturally hand drawn then we have the smear tool this is basically smearing colors about so you can actually smear things across each other like this you will use this a lot to blend in colors it's now a bit strong but if you set the strength down lower you can make the effect a little bit less drastic and you get nice smeary stripes across your object perfect for creating that hand painted look then we have the clone stamp tool and what this does is it will let us define an area which we can use to copy so over here if i control click on this line it will take this area as the clone stamp and i can just draw in a new one anywhere where i want basically copying this entire thing then we have the paint bucket tool which is actually very very simple it's select any color click on the object and it will just fill the entire object now pretty simple stuff there's one thing though that you need to change before continuing with this and that's the actual bleed so over here we have our uv line and this is a bleed value now it's currently set to 2 pixels which is the default value and if we go over here down into options you will see it's two pixels like i said but this needs to be bigger this needs to be 16 pixels which is the default bleed value for a 2k texture it's pretty crucial that you do this because you want these to have a nice overlap so now let me just take a regular gray color which we'll use for the actual blade something like that and if i click it now you will see we have lots more bleed going on over here which is good so we don't get any strange overlap going on now the final two over here is called the mask tool personally i don't really use that a lot i just use this tool up here so if we tap into edit mode we go back into edit mode obviously we can select certain parts of our model so if i go into face select and for example i want to change the color of this bottom part of our blade here i can just hover over certain objects and hit l now these are all separate objects that i combined using ctrl j to merge them together and that's why i can still select each of these linked objects but if you have an object which consists out of just one part it will just select the entire part instead though you could add seams and make sure it selects by seam so you can still select certain parts of it in this case if you follow along with this tutorial you can perfectly find select any part of this object so i'm going to select all of the parts that i want to change in color which are all of these and i want to make them blue now when doing texture painting i recommend always using reference and in this case our model is based on an actual game asset which already has been textured so we can use that as a reference now i'm going to open up a new menu by going down here in the left corner and i'm just going to drag in a new window and i'm going to open up this image of the master sword now you can just find one online i googled master sword wind waker and this is what i got so that's the one i used so over here we have our master sword image and we can use this to create our texture so if i tap back out of edit mode in here you will see nothing's changed and you still get one grey thing and if i change the color here and i fill it it still fills the entire thing so that's not what we want we only want to fill the parts that we actually selected in edit mode now there's this function up here called paint mask and if we select that it will create a paint mask now this might be faint and i doubt it's very easily readable for you guys on youtube but there's a difference in color now between the top and the bottom if i click now you will see it fills only the part that we actually selected in edit mode so that's how you can easily create a paint mask based on certain faces now let's do this one more time to actually fill in the color of our gem so i'm gonna go tab back into edit mode make sure we deselect everything here and i'm gonna circle select so c and then select all of the faces that belong to the actual gem which are these and voila tap out of edit mode and we can now see that this is the only part that's actually masked and we can actually draw on let's go ahead and use this eyedropper so we click here click on the eyedropper tool and we can select any color in our image or on our screen basically i'm going to select this yellow color and click there and we now have our yellow gem color for the paint bucket tool you could also use s if you look at the color selection you will see it's changing so it's now the blue color it's the yellow color it's the gray color it's any color within this window but if we hop on over to a new window so for example our reference image it doesn't work if you want to use a color that's outside of this actual window don't know why that is but in this case we have to use the eyedropper which is down here and it does work if you now press a and select everything you will see this is our entire object and with our fill colors out of the way we can now start adding in detail shadows highlights and creating that realism and look that we actually want for our textured paint now i won't detail this entire object because it will take too long i think for the final texture painting that i did it took well over two hours but i will just show you techniques on how to achieve the result as i had what you do is you can just select a color here and then use this slider on the right side to actually create a darker or a lighter value so in this case i have a darker value now when doing texture painting i recommend using a drawing or pen tablet now i'm using a sense labs tablet which they've kindly sent me to test out it's a very nice tablet and i've been using it for a couple of weeks now and it's perfect for doing texture painting sculpting and other things as well now i'm using the medium bundle this includes the medium tablet with a true 16 to 9 aspect ratio the quick keys keypad which allows you to map 40 shortcuts per application and has an oled display so you don't have to remember their functions a pen case including a normal three button pen and a thin pen replacement nibs and a wireless dongle and adapter two usb charging cables a drawing glove and finally a sturdy sleeve which can hold all of this use the link in the description down below to get a special kaizen discount and support the channel at the same time alright so i have a darker color selected i'm thinking i need to turn down the strength a little bit and let's go ahead and start adding in some shadows here so i'm gonna just ever so slightly brush these in maybe turn the strength a little bit down even more and you know you can just draw these in wherever you want and basically the secret is to just use many strokes for these details again like i said we can also just use mask so i'm in edit mode now i'm just going to select all of these faces in the middle here and if we look at the image on this side here it's uh slightly wider than the rest of it so tap into edit mode again let's go to a lighter color again don't change the actual value just use this dark and light slider to change the overall value and we can now just sort of add in these highlights make it a little bit bigger you know so the strength a little bit higher let's make it lighter overall something like that we'll do [Music] a little bit lighter still and then go even lighter make it a little bit smaller and just brush in a couple of these streaks which sort of represent the light going across our metallic object and that works fine and maybe a dark one as well something like that works perfectly fine for me white at the top there maybe apply a little bit of shadow at this bottom part here and there you have it so if we now select everything again this is our new look again like i said we can do this for every part so tap back into edit mode maybe select the guard tab out of edit mode we only have the guard selected now let's hit s hover over it and release it so we now get the blue color use the dark slider or light slider to actually get some contrast in there and we can just brush in ever so slightly shadows and stuff and you want to add a lot of variation so you can actually change the color a lot you know it's like a little bit darker colors because you want this thing to look natural and basically natural materials have a lot of variation in their color just go ahead and just draw in all of this detail that you want and the final thing i want to show you before you can go ham creating whatever you want using this amazing texture painting feature in blender is these stroke types so if you open up the stroke menu which is above the falloff menu we have our stroke method set to space there's several different things that you can actually do we have dots as well and which creates a more dotty look and let me go ahead and change the color so you can actually see a little bit better it creates a more dotty look than the space one we have the airbrush one which gives a little bit of an airbrush look overall i usually only use the default one and this align tool and the line tool is actually very very nice so we can select this blue color if you look at our texture on this side you'll see we have these darker lines going across now you might be thinking okay so how can i achieve those similar lines well with the line tool you can just click drag and release to actually create a straight line from point to point so we can use this technique and do something like this and sort of pair it like that and create these lines going across our object these are not completely nice so in this case you might want to go and take the soften tool there and just soften these up make them look a little bit more natural and voila that's how texture painting works in blender now to get a good result basically there's no magic tip it's just practice practice practice you need a lot of practice to get something that actually looks good look at lots of examples look at stylized games look at real world examples because you can still apply all of these things like lighting shadows where should lights be where should shadows be what makes sense for my object look at lots of reference and you will eventually get really good at texture painting but with all of these things that i showed you you can at least get started on creating your own master sword texture the project file for this video is available on my patreon so please consider becoming a patron to get access to this project file and over 50 other project files as well i want to thank all of my patrons which you can see up here right now for their support it's really appreciated and really helps me maintain this channel and while you're still here why don't you check out this video and learn even more about blender [Music]

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 302,813

Keywords: texture painting blender, texture painting 3d models, how to texture paint in blender, blender texture painting for beginners, xencelabs tablet, xencelabs, xencelabs quick keys, drawing tablet for beginners, drawing tablet review, blender texture painting, blender texture tutorial

Id: 9OVvnOh2ZGk

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022