The Best Way to Texture Paint in Blender! | Blender Tutorial

what is up everybody I am Alex from level up plus VFX and today I'm going to show you what I think is the absolute best method to texture paint in blender texture painting is something that I think as every artist goes along their visual effects journey be it blender Maya 3ds Max whatever program you're trying to learn texture painting is one thing that sometimes you just kind of hit a brick wall and you can't understand how to properly you know mix two textures together on one object and today I'm hoping to make that a little bit easier by sharing what I have found to be the most efficient method to do so so today we're going to create this little path through my grassy plane here I just have some pillars up here for no reason whatsoever but we're gonna we're gonna go ahead and create this path of dirt through our grass and I am using quick little Mega scans textures to do this I just released a tutorial talking about how to get a little bit better quality out of these Mega scans and while we're not using the displacement uh node today we're going to be doing a little bit of displacement work um and of course you can always use the specular if it helps make your grass look a little bit better let's take the specular off to show that real quick if we take that off it's just a little bit more washed out so I like having the specular in there but let's just jump straight into it I'm going to clear out my mask and I'm going to show you exactly how we did it alright so the very first thing we have is our plane which I've just applied a bit of a noise modifier just to break its shape up a little bit and I want a dirt path to go through the center of this plane now there's many ways you've probably learned to do this you could use vertex painting you could use weight painting and weight painting and the method that I'm going to show you are very similar however I prefer texture painting using the texture paint option that is built into blender and for the longest time I was scared of texture pain because I didn't understand how I was able to actually you know create a mask using texture paint and I had actually paint on a texture I had to create an image it was very weird and hopefully I'm going to simplify that for you and show you exactly what you need to do in order to get this working properly so we have this plane and we have our Shader editor here we have our two textures loaded into it so again these are just two different textures that I have and I just copied the all the information from one texture over to the other one and we're going to mix these together so how are we going to mix them well let's go ahead and drop in a mix Shader node and we'll drop that in after our first texture here and then we're going to plug our other texture into the other end of the mix Shader and we're going to add an image texture now you don't need to make this super high resolution but when you click new go ahead and set it to something you could leave it at 10 24 or I'll do 2048 and just make sure it's squared because that's how your UV is and we're going to name this something that we'll remember so for this I'm going to call it Road texture and we'll just call it Road texture so I'm going to go ahead and hit OK I'm going to plug that into my factor and then while I'm clicked on this road texture image we're going to switch over to texture paint mode now something that might be helpful is switching over to the viewport shading mode instead of using Cycles you could probably do it in Eevee and it would look just as fine but I like using the viewport shading mode now we need to paint in our road texture since we're using this image as our mask for these two shaders we're just going to need to paint in a line here or a little squiggly line in order to do that there's a couple ways you can make it look a little bit nicer than just using a default brush and that's going to be with these Rock brushes so if you go over to the tools section of your texture paint tab you you'll be able to go down and you'll have this option called texture mask and you're going to want to select a rock brush now I have these all loaded in I got them online for free from a free resource you might need to do something different and I'll actually have a link to these Rock brushes in the description the blend file so if you hold F you can actually change the size of your texture so it might come in too big like it did for me or it might come in too small so I'm actually going to make it a little bit smaller so one thing you're going to want to do is you're going to change the mass mapping from tiled to random because if you leave it at tiled and you start painting on your scene and let's make that brush a little bit thicker just for demonstration purposes you're going to notice that you start getting tiles of how your brush is supposed to look and you can see that doesn't look very natural as we paint through so setting it to random will allow it to be randomly placed as it goes throughout the scene and that can look much more natural and just break up your environment a little bit more so what I'm going to want to do though is make this a little bit smaller I want to go through and paint like a curvy path so I'm going to go ahead and go through we're going to have this curvy path go through our scene like this and I might want it a little bit stronger so I'm just go through it again one more time now before you do anything after you've painted in your texture though you're going to go ahead and click save all images this will save this image that you made as an actual file because if you were to close blender or refresh the tab or something reset you would actually lose this image mask you want to always make sure you're clicking save all images and once it's grayed out you know that it's currently saved so looking through it in Cycles we can clearly see that our road texture is now going through our scene it looks nice because we're mixing shaders we're getting the bump from each image separately and they're not overlapping or anything like that and it does look nice however I think we can take this a step further make it a little bit more realistic I want to inset this road a little bit into the ground more like it was carved out of the grass it's not just something that's you know on the same level as the grass and there's a couple ways you could do this you could do this with a displacement node in your Shader network but there's a better way to do this and that's using you your modifiers you could also do this in Geo nodes I'm sure but using in modifiers is easier and by doing it modifiers or Geo nodes you're freeing yourself up to add a displacement map later if you wanted to add in your displacement so I'm going to go ahead and hit add modifier and I'm going to choose displace then I'll go over to the settings icon on the texture and in this settings drop down I'm going to go ahead and choose the road texture as my image now that I've done that we'll see that it's tiling all weirdly and that's because we're using local coordinates and we want to be using UV coordinates so go ahead and select that and it will update and because the geometry is so low resolution we need to actually just add a little bit more so I'm going to go ahead and add in a subdivision surface modifier and I'm going to put that on top of my rode displacement and we'll set this to something like three once we've done that we can clearly see that the road is starting to bulge out of the ground but I actually want it in the negative Direction so I'm going to go ahead and set the strength to negative one and we'll see that it's dipping into the ground now now obviously I think I made my map a little too big so I'm going to go ahead and Shrink that by going into texture paint mode which I'm already in and I'm going to set this to Black and I'm just going to shrink the area that we want to remove it by just a little bit so again this is why you'd probably want to use the good old you know Shader view because it'll take forever if you were to use the normal viewport you might need to disable your mask as well but it looks like it's working good for me so I'm going to shrink this in just a little bit make it a little less dramatic and as you can see our displacement map is updating as we do this and I like that I think that looks pretty good um it's you know it doesn't have the greatest fall off that it could so we can we can lower the fall off if we wanted or if we needed to we could bring this up and make it sharper you know you can do a lot with this so I think you know cranking this white value up to just match the size of the roads a little bit more uh seems seems pretty nice now you could also go into your displacement uh modifier go into the texture and play with color settings so if you wanted less contrast or more contrast you know to make the road really really dig in there you can do that I'm going to set this back to one and I think that is probably pretty good I like how that road you know is now sunken into the ground so let's go ahead and look through it through our Cycles viewports again and then we're going to save our images and just like before I'm going to go ahead and click save images to make sure that we've stay up to date and there we go we have a road that's digging pretty nicely into our environment but yeah that's personally the best method I've found for texture painting it allows you a lot of control when it comes to you know how many textures you can add because it's you know theoretically infinite it's just how many images you can save just always remember to be saving all images and you should be pretty safe something you might accidentally do is you might paint a splash like I think I have a splotch of texture here that I don't want but I I'd go in and paint that out but it's going to slow my computer down so I'm not going to bother with that for now the really cool thing about this texture because it's an image saved on your computer is you could go into something like scatter now we could say that we want to scatter some objects so I'm going to go over to my asset browser and I'm going to choose some grass let's let's find a grass patch here so I'm going to choose This Grass patch and I'm going to select my plane and you need to be in object mode in order to use scatter five so I'm going to go ahead and select my plane and I have my object selected I'm going to go ahead and hit scatter objects I need to add it to my scene first but I'm going to go ahead and click scatter objects and once we've done that we can see that there's not enough grass on here and it's the wrong size so let's quickly fix that now we have all this grass on our object but we really only want it in the grass so we're going to go ahead and fix that using this mask that we were provided earlier I'm going to go over to my culling masks and I'm going to select image and we can just go ahead and type in rode and we have our row texture here so I'll go ahead and select that and now suddenly our road texture is the thing that's masking out our grass and this is another good way to see where you might have some semi-transparent areas so if I set this to four just to max out the scene so as I can see you know the grass is kind of leaking onto my road a little bit more than I want so I'm probably going to use that texture mask and I'm just to clean it up a little bit so I'm back into my you know material view node I'm going to make sure I have my plane selected and the image selected go back to my texture paint mode and I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to paint you know this A Little Bit Stronger just to make sure that the grass is properly you know being separated from our road here so let's just go through something like this and we can see as we go through it disappears and then we're cleaning it up just a little bit more so there's some areas because this is not a solid texture you know that it's going to leave grass like Tufts in the middle of the road but actually I think that's kind of realistic you know the grass isn't going to be fully gone from the road there aren't little pieces of grass that will creep back onto your road so you know if you want to do you could just make sure that you had a full you know plain brush that has no opacity in the middle but I think that looks pretty good so after cleaning up the road texture a little bit I just went ahead and removed my texture mask and I painted in the areas where there was grass you know kind of in the middle of the road that I didn't want I wanted to show you one more thing that's really cool with this which is if we go out of texture paint mode and again make sure you're saving all your images once you're done painting and we go back to our object mode we can pop over back to scatter five and we can do something a little bit cool so let's go ahead and find some of these like Wasteland clusters I think these will look really good on the road so I'm going to go ahead and select that and I'm going to change this to browser selection just so I don't have to drag it into my scene and once it's selected I'm going to go ahead and click scatter assets once again and we're going to make sure that again we use our image attribute and we're going to use rode and we're just going to want to invert it so we're going to oh whoops Road there we go and we're going to want to invert it by hitting this little invert button so now it's just being scattered on our road so now I can randomize the scale find something that I want so I just want a couple little Tufts like that I think that'll be good and let's go ahead and we'll save and we'll see how that looks I can't say for certain that this is the official way that Studios do it but it's got to be pretty close because this is by far one of the simplest methods for you know controlling your textures your object distribution and so much more and it's just this method that I love to use but that's all there is to it you know I've been Alex from level up plus VFX if you liked this video go ahead and leave a like if you want to see more blender tutorials or new tutorials which are coming soon go ahead and stick around for that and I'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: LevelUp+ VFX

Views: 6,261

Keywords: blender, tutorial, texture, painting, quixel, megascans, environments, education, fun

Id: Aorz_Md4HBQ

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023