The Sculpt Bridge Tool for Blender

greetings hobbyists this is Alan of v and in this video we're going to have a look at the new sculpt Bridge tool from nodes interactive so I'm pretty hyped about this tool I'm going to be really honest firstly it's free which is incredibly generous from nodes interactive and second damn this is going to save some time this allows you to do some effects so quickly it's absolutely untrue now there's a few Oddities about this that I want to go through before we begin so let's talk through that straight away the first is that this is a geometry node tool it is not an actual add-on in the same sense as we normally would install add-ons because of that you're going to have to find wherever you download it you're going to find a blend file there not a zip folder as you normally would and then you just transfer that folder into wherever you keep your blender assets so slightly different process but it's really easy to do in fact it probably takes less time than installing an add-on once you've done this it's really easy to access all you're going to do is Select something so I've brought two quad spheres in and join them together and you're going to go to sculpt mode and then these two tools are found up here in your unassign nodes so you've got the bridge tool and the punch hole tool you can also for each of these if you can use them a lot right click and assign them to a shortcut or add to Quick favorites so that if you uh use this and press Q for me I've got hard Ops it's going to be there so I'll do that with the other one as well your quick favorites will probably just have a simple tool if you don't have hard Ops so the way this works is really easy I'm just going to bring out our tools here so we can see them you're going to need the draw face sets tool and the way this works is you just draw your face set and then you go to wherever you want it to connect to and draw your face set there and then you're going to either come up here and press Bridge tool or you're going to come to your quick favorites here and click Bridge tool and it's going to bridge them and that looks perfectly fine but where this becomes really cool is the bottom left hand box so you've got your options here and the first thing you can do is either squeeze so make it wider or thinner which looks really nice nice for sort of spindly bits and the other one that's really important for me is the gravity tool which makes this look well kind of goopy there are other ones as well so for example you've got your smooth distance will affect how it Smooths there we go that makes this really really tight and then you can make it more smooth you've also got the smooth face set which will change how it interacts around the edge the other one is the L div which I have no idea what that stands for but that's more useful in the other tool and then any point you draw two face sets as soon as you use your Bridge tool it's going to bringe them together and again you can fiddle around as you want so this is really cool for making these awesome what I can only describe as gooey effects let's do a really big one here for the next tool now the other thing I want to mention with this if you're not used to these face sets is that you can always click up here and click face set from invisible and that will get rid of your face set and you can obviously use the smooth tool so you will have to go off to this onto something else and then hold down shift and you can smooth or you can actually go to the smooth tool itself and smooth that out so you can smooth these Transitions and anything on this really nicely so for example that's a bit sharp for me let's smooth that out then the other tool is basically the opposite of this instead of you bridging two points it will cut through well effectively it's still bridging but it's bridging through the inside of the object so let's go to draw face sets again and I'm going to draw something like here and then we'll go on to the other side and do exactly the same thing and then come up and punch hole and it creates a hole through your object again you've got a lot of things you can fill around with like the smooth face sets is quite useful the other one is that sometimes this goes a little wrong so you might need to fiddle around with the flip normals or the flip Bridge so if anything does go a bit weird they're the things to fiddle around with the other thing is you've got this L div which will do different things to affect how this looks often how sharp it is on this outer edge here and if we want to we can do some more of that so I'm just going to use the f tool to make my brush a bit thinner and then we'll cut through let's say somewhere here and we've got that now you can see this has sometimes a little bit of a Twist to it and again sometimes you can FID around with the different settings to be able to change that so for example smooth face sets is really useful for that that looks way better but I have found that with this this generally does look better with a little bit of smoothing around the edges just depending on what you want to get as your end result the other thing I also quite like is the crease tool set with a minus and I often sort of crease in and then smooth out a bit to add a little bit more like it's pulling at some sort of muscle or the surface tension of this sort of gooey stringy surface and that works quite well and then again I'll increase the plus and do things like that so they work quite nicely together to really enhance this effect in my opinion but it's just a matter of playing and finding out what you like the look of so a really nice simple tool to add some effectively gooey sort of features or something that's a bit more stringy the other thing that's probably worth mentioning which I think is quite nice is depending on the situation you can also let's draw something there and there and then Bridge these if we add some gravity in here you can also affect the gravity Direction so for example you'll notice at the moment it's in the Z axis minus one so you can also play around with it here as well as here but importantly with the gravity Direction you can also change the direction so for example having a look at my Gizmo I might want this a little bit more on the Y so we can sort of have this pulling over to one side more than the other which again gives just this really nice level of control and while we could do this with the grab brush I think you'll agree this makes it look a little bit better and it just seems to use whatever algorithm this is doing to give you a vastly nicer look and give you that level of control the final thing I wanted to mention which is more common on the face sets tool than this tool itself but I thought it'd be useful is that if you draw a face set you'll notice that if you start drawing again then you're going to create a new face set color so you can't really easily edit this initial face set and you also can't arras any sections of this there's no arras feature here but all you need to do is put your mouse over the area you want to continue the color of hold down control before you click and now you'll be adding the same color on again you can also use that to delete because if you hold down control when you're an area that doesn't have any face sets that will effectively erase your face set so you can use that to then come in and draw let's say another one here oh no I want that to be bigger but I've clicked somewhere else so hold control and draw it bigger or come to the side hold control and then make it smaller so you can use this to be able to control exactly what you're doing with a little bit more finesse so there we go short video but it's just that easy to use that tool and as mentioned it is free if you found that video useful please do hit the like button help share it around and I think nodes interactive deserves all the attention they can get for this add-on and again very generous of them giving this away for free so do go check this out also if you'd like to support the channel further we do have a patreon page where you get these videos a week ahead of time and add free there's a link in the description to that and again any support is really appreciated have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 2,763

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, tutorial, beginner, pro, how to, guide, blender guru, modelling, addon, add-on, add on, free, sculpt, sculpting

Id: sa2PglrGdZI

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024