Workflow for Creating Normal Map Decals in Blender

decals or are they called decals regardless of how you say it they're an important part of the texturing process that is much easier than you may think in the past they've been fairly involved in setting up correctly but in this video we're going to take a look at getting our feet wet with whatever they're called and learn a quick workflow to get us started I'm chunk traffic and err with CG cookie let's get to it so I'm here in my fresh blender scene and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna add a plane to this scene here and this is going to be our backdrop for the asset that we're gonna create and before we go ahead and start creating any of the geometry I want to go ahead and set up our camera view which is going to be used to render out the accurate proportions of our deckle so I'm going to add a camera to the scene and we're going to come over where our outliner is and I'm just going to switch this to a 3d view and I'll bring this down a little bit and I'm going to hit zero on my numpad to go into my camera view and we can see that it's actually just going to show up underneath of our plane here and I'm going to hit all its are to clear the rotation so that it's just aiming straight down so now I'm gonna bring this guy up just so he's over top of our plane there so we're gonna be able to see the asset that we're creating right and I'm gonna go ahead and switch the type of this camera to be orthographic so now you can see that that's really gonna blow everything out but we're gonna be able to play around with that using our orthographic scale so I'm gonna bring that down just a little bit but before I play around with that I want to make sure that we are going to be using square dimensions for our camera and right now you can see that the resolution is going to be 1920 by 1080 so I'm gonna just click and drag over those two and I'm gonna do something a little bit smaller like 1024 so now we're gonna be able to have this square dimension and that's gonna be a lot easier to work with when we're trying to render out textures so they were not getting any weird distortion or anything so now I can come back into my camera tab on our orthographic scale just bring that right down so that it fits pretty much on the inside of our square there and again we can have a little bit of buffer zone there it's not really super important that we get the one-to-one of the square but we want to make sure that we have a bit of a backdrop for this asset so now that we've got that sorted out I'm gonna come into this view here and I'm just gonna get rid of all of the extra little gizmos and stuff that we don't really need I'm also going to change our preview mode here from studio lighting to madcap and I'm going to change the Mac cap to be this guy right here our normal map and so this is how a lot of the magic is gonna happen is because we're pretty much just previewing and almost live baking normal information just by creating geometry and using the Mac app to capture this kind of simulated normal calculations so now that I've got that selected I'm just gonna right-click on any one of these icons come down to header and I'm just gonna check that guy off so it's going to hide the header and again don't worry you can come back and get it back with this little arrow here so if you accidentally do that and you didn't want to you can just go ahead and click on that guy again but I find it gets in the way a little bit so I'm going to do that and I'm just going to zoom in real close there and so now that I've got that all set up I want to go ahead and start creating some of the geometry so I'm going to go ahead and just hide the camera right now as we work on the geometry and I'm going to go ahead and add a circle and for this circle I'm gonna make it 64 vertices just to add a little bit more resolution because at the end of the day we're not going to have to really worry about the overall amount of vertices or faces of this guy because we're going to render it out to an image and so I want to scale this guy down because if we take a look we can see that the bounds of this circle are just outside of our camera bounds so I'm just going to scale this guy in a little bit and then I will apply the scale so I'm going to come in and bring this guy up scale some edges in and then I'll bring some edges down and right now we're not going to get any information popping up in our render here because everything is very straight and everything is pretty straight on so if we take a look right now right you can see that we're not going to get a lot of lighting or surface information because everything is just from a straight on view if I take these edges and I scale this guy in you can see that now we're going to start to get some surface information now before I go any further I want to make sure that our normals are pointing the correct direction so I can come up to this viewport overlays and hit face orientation and you can see that our normals are indeed facing the correct direction now if you're following along and you had something that looks like this this means that you have your back face is showing and so your normals are actually flipped and that's something that you're going to want to rectify so I'm just going to select everything and I'm going to hit alt and N and you can see that we have our normals panel and flip and you want to make sure that all of your faces that are outward facing are going to be blue and that's going to also reflect in your render here so I'll come back up and get rid of that and I'm going to go ahead and just quickly finish the screw head here so I'll extrude this guy in you and I'll close that guy off then I'm gonna go ahead and with everything selected just shade that smooth and you can see that while that looks a little bit nicer in some areas we're actually going to lose a lot of those hard edges and so with that I want to come in and I'm going to use a modifier to get those edges back and I'm gonna come down to bevel and we can see that we're gonna get a little bit of those edges back but if we take a look at our wireframe and start adding this segments up we're actually going to start beveling each individual edge and that's not exactly what I want so instead what I'm gonna do is come down to our limit mode and I'm going to select angle and now this is going to do it based off of an angle threshold that we have so I'm going to bring our width way down and it looks like all of the edges that I'm interested in beveling have been beveled with maybe the exception of this guy here if I just decrease our threshold here to something like 20 that should be just enough to capture that guy and now I want to go ahead and add that little cutout in the top of our screw head here and with that I'm gonna do a boolean cutout so I'm going to add another modifier and I'm going to have to go ahead and add the boolean cutter so I'm going to add another mesh in this case it's going to be a cube here and I'll just scale that guy down scale them in on the Y there bring them up on the zed and maybe scale him out on the X as well so now the viewport is going to be a little bit busy and I'm not going to want to see this cube in the way the entire time that I'm trying to operate or work here so I'm going to come to its object properties and under the viewport display I'm going to display it as a wire so that way it's not going to show up in our 3d render here and I'm not going to see all of that information showing up in front of my asset here so now that I've got that set up I'll come back into our boolean and I'm going to select the object as our cube here and so that's going to cut through our geometry but it's going to give us a lot of artifacts for the faces here and so one way we can fix this is if I come into our modifier stack I can actually bring the boolean over top of our bevel modifier here so now if we take a look we can see that we're actually starting to bevel those edges a little bit and it's going to give us some better faces but if we take a look in our normals here we can see that we're still going to get a little bit of that artifacting so there's another useful feature of the bevel modifier that we can use and we can go ahead and harden normals so if I select this guy you can see that nothing's going to happen and that's because we actually have to enable the auto smooth option in our mesh settings so I'm going to come down to the object property tab there and under normals we have this option for auto smooth and so now if I select that guy you can see that we're going to get a nice clean and smooth surface and so now that we've figured out our artifacting issue I'm going to come into our bevel modifier and just increase that up a little bit so that we're gonna have a little bit more defining features I also want to come into our cutter here and I'm just going to bring these down because I want to go ahead and actually scale them out on the Y here and you can see that as we're doing that we're going to be adding a little bit of bevel to this guy here and maybe I'll bring it in just a little bit and you can see as I'm doing that it's actually going to be affecting how our bevel modifier is going to work so I want to make sure that I get it at a pretty good and large bevel there and not something that's a little too jagged or sharp so that's looking pretty cool and overall I'm pretty satisfied with our asset and so now that I'm satisfied with the overall output of this deckle I'm gonna go ahead and render it out and there's two ways that we can go about rendering it out both with a background and without a background and it's really going to depend on what your going to want to do with this asset once you've rendered it out but I'll go ahead and show you both ways so the first way is pretty easy right with a background and if I come into here and I come over and bring our header down I'm just going to go to view and if you port render image you can see that we're gonna get this guy pop up and this is our final render so we can go ahead with image and save as and we'll be able to save it in any file format that blender allows but if you don't want to have a background here and would instead prefer to have this is just a single asset with an alpha transparent background what we'll have to do is just come into our output settings here or sorry our render settings come down to where it says film and under our filter size we'll have a transparent checkbox and that's going to allow us to cast the background as being transparent so now when I come back into this view and I just select our plane there and hide it I can go ahead under view and viewport render image and you can see that now it's going to render out our asset with a transparent background and so we can go ahead and save as and you can see that I've already saved out one of each we're gonna want to make sure that we use a file format that is going to allow us to use an alpha Channel or transparency so our JPEGs are out of the question and we're going to want to make sure that we save it as an RGB a so that we're taking use of that alpha Channel and we can go ahead and save image by using blenders matte cap features we can generate speedy efficient decals rather quickly we no longer need to wait for a render to be able to see exactly what our normals will look like which expedites the entire design process tenfold using some simple modifiers in a few primitive shapes we can create an endless amount of deckle designs to be used in any way that we choose thanks again for checking out this CG cookie tutorial and all the best in your blending you

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 79,761

Rating: 4.9455481 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender 2.8, blender how to, decals, normal map, blender decals

Id: zwEXUN83LeI

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020