If you like to make art, create new things and if you enjoy the process of doing so, you *are* a good artist. Nobody instinctively knows about colour theory, rules of composition or perspective. Hell, it took all of mankind thousands of years to understand those things. Don't be intimidated by more experienced artists. The only thing that matters is being driven to create.
+IGameChangerI Colour theory, composition, and perspective are all bare essentials compared to what veteran artists know. In fact, they only take about an hour to learn, if your memory is half decent.
Xavier Dingeldein That's not what I'm saying. Anyone can make a wheel, but it took quite a while for us to invent it. My point is that you can learn to be 'better' at art, and it's not just something that you can be good at right from the start.
Most people I've seen doing this (I watch a LOT of speedpaints/modelling) do most of what you're doing through nodes only. Thank you for showing the steps, so we can see how easy it really is.
An important thing to remember is that when you are making progress in texture paint mode, save your images in the UV editor and not the actual blend file.
I was looking for that in the video, when the next day I found out that I lost everything... It's too late for my class project, but Thank You for that comment. I'm gonna need that in future :P
This is a superb intro. It's very clear and concise, and you're still fitting in the basic principles driving certain decisions. Thanks for putting this video together.
yeah, still a great tutorial but not hand painting to me (when i saw the thumbnail i was wondering did he really painted that? and why would he paint that if he wanted something realistic). he used hand painting on his process tho, it wasnt only applying the texture w/ nodes. but yeah still useful
Thank you, this was very helpful. You lay out the concepts very clearly. I had never thought to put a painted B/W texture underneath photographic ones to influence the final outcome. Lovely work. Thanks.
To export this, create a new image for your bake output. Then add an image texture node to the object with your new image selected in it, also don’t connect the node to anything and keep it selected. In Properties, Render tab, Bake you can select diffuse as the Bake Type with Color selected rather than Direct or Indirect. With your node still selected click Bake to bake the textures to the output image. This will give you just the texture without lighting or any special effects, for those you will need to change the Bake Type and settings.
Just subscribed to your channel. Lots of good blender tutorials here. Your approach seems simple and to the point and not in the weeds like many of the other tutorials. Keep up the excellent work!
Cool tutorial, thanks for sharing. You should split windows to have both Node Editor and 3D view windows at the same time so you don't waste time jumping from one to the other. You could also toggle between Rendered and Solid view with Shift+Z or between Solid and Texture view with Alt+Z.
McFlyJools I was originally splitting my windows to show both at the same time and everyone complained. I Try to use as few shortcuts as possible as not to confuse people. Thanks for the advice!
Nice vid. It would have been nice though to share the brushes etc...to actually be able to do the same tut with you like a lot of other Blender tuts do. I can make the brush myself, but would've been more fun if you had provided them as a link. Thanks for the vid.
Liked the tutorial. This is easier than the workarounds I've been using. I would suggest you by a cheap Wacom tablet to draw with though. I used to do a lot of editing in Photoshop and Blender with a mouse. You'll pull off cleaner and more detailed lines with a pen.
Robert Sanders I had a tablet a long time ago when I used Gimp, but I couldn't for the life of me get the hang of it. It's something I have wanted to try again using Blender, but money prevents me from buying most things haha
I got my older tablet for $80 on Craigslist and a new small wacom intuos for the same. I know what you mean, using a pen was very awkward for me too, but you get use to it. I use Photoshop but I haven't used it on Gimp, so I don't know if you ran into compatibility issues. If you change your mind, it does work on blender; I use it for sculpting and for sketching with the grease pencil, which saves time and is far more accurate, especially if you're not the best artist in the world.
Robert Sanders A tablet works fine in gimp for me. I am also using krita, it behaves to coral painter like gimp to photoshop. Looking forward to using this technique with krita brushes/ textures.
Great video! You explain something a whole lot better than some other videos I have seen. I am an amateur with blender and trying to learn the basics. So far I have only created cups and a plate.With the bolt I got up to the point of creating a scratch brush to use on the bolt. I had no issues painting the edges white but after going through the steps of adding a brush it responded similar to how the black unloaded brush behaved. It has transparency for the brush image and is in png format... Exported from gimp. Any hints on how to fix this?
Great tutorial: It would have been nice though to share the brushes etc...to actually be able to do the same tut with you like a lot of other Blender tuts do. I cannot make the brush myself, but would've been better if you had provided them as a link. Also, need links to all jpg, hdr and png files to follow along exactly.
+Gary Kohan HDR lighting is never necessary. You can simply add a sun lamp or a few planes with an emission shader in order to achieve lighting. HDR is just quicker so these tutorials don't drag on forever. HDRs are also expensive and I am not legally allowed to share. I actually made a tutorial for making your own brushes, but it is also just as easy to use a cloud texture instead of the brush to create the effect. Any image saved as a PNG can be used as a brush in Blender. Just pop it open and you are ready to go.
How do I save a painted textured model correctly? Because every time I re-open a model I colored last time keeps on disappearing and I hate to paint it all over again.
The image you paint needs to be saved somewhere (like in the project folder). At the bottom of the UV window, you will see the word 'image' with a * next to it. The * means there are unsaved changes.
I had to connect the Image Texture node (the one that stores the texture that you paint by hand) to a RGB to BW node before connecting that to the Mix Node. Otherwise, the mask wouldn't work. I spent like 30 minutes trying to figure that out.
I also noticed you had a little trouble with the lighting near the end. If you put it on a plane it might help, as it's basically floating in space with nothing to catch and reflect the sunlight.
Robert Sanders You are correct to a degree. I notice, in watching this again, that my sun was pointing directly at the top of the nut when I wanted it toward the side. A plane would have created light bounces that would solve this, also moving the sun lamp would solve it. I try not to add extra objects and geometry to tutorials as to not confuse people...but I guess I failed this time haha.
+aneroph Good tut, very thorough. As for the sun, the distance to an object does not matter. You can even put it below your object or in your object and it still shines the same. It is parallel light so it is unlike other lights when it comes to placement. Power is the most important factor, and then size when it comes to the sun.
+aneroph you explain very well and this was fun! However, as we know after the modeling and texturing is complete, lighting is by far the part of the process that really helps make that scene come alive! Especially in Blender's Cycles MAJOR lighting breakthrough scripting and functionality! I would've loved to see your method of lighting in this pretty simple scene. We can handle it, and enjoy MORE! Just a thought. GREAT TUT! ;)
very useful tutorial, thanks a lot. Would be great if you could help me with my problem. All my texture paintings just disappear after a wile during I m doing something else on the object. The object becomes just black again. I cant help it. Any idea how to fix it? thx.
by the way, it is usually caused by not having enought ram as far as i know (i have two similar pc's, one with 4gigs of ram and another with 8, and it only happens on the 4gb one when i have other memory draining programs open)
I am planning a later tutorial for that, however, if you want to cut to the ending, there is an option under the UVs menu in the image editor window that allows you to export the UV layout. You can then play with it in a photo editor instead of Blender, although this comes with some downfalls.
Any chance your could make a tutorial on how to bake UV textures for low-poly game assets :), ex. diff UV map, Ambient occ UV map and normal map for use in ex. Unity 3d :)... i tried the out of box baking renderings but failed :(
+my tube I have plans for another Hand Painting tutorial with some more features like exporting UVs and baking. Unfortunately my video editing software is currently refusing to launch so it is going to have to wait a little.
I thought this was hand painted tutorial, Hand Painted Materials, but you used a texture for the rust metal? Also, I had to play this at 1.25 speed as you are very very... very slow talking. But interesting tutorial I did manage to follow and learn something! thanks
I'm not sure why this happens, perhaps it's a bug, but sometimes the image texture box will disappear in more recent versions of Blender. Usually if you add a displacement modifier to the object there is a little box to the right of the displacement modifier window that says "Show texture in texture tab" when you mouse over it. Click that box and the texture tab will reappear. Then remove the displacement modifier. If this is a little too confusing, you can try to start the project over again by closing Blender and reopening it.
+Super Killer223 If you update the images and resave them in any way then blender likes to forget where they are or if the picture ever existed to begin with. Usually just going to the image texture node and telling it where the pic is again will fix the issue. This also can happen from time to time if anything moves or changes on your computer. Blender can be tricky about losing images and it's very hard to find them again on old projects.
What is the reason the painted "rust" during about 14:00 doesn't "save" WITH the painted texture on the nut? When I saved the nut.blend file to come back to do more work later, it was gone. Am I just not clicking a certain box, tab setting, etc...OR can you just not "save" at that point in the process? Or is it because I haven't attached an image texture to it yet?
+JohnnySkillish You have to save the image texture as an image. Go to the UV/image editor and open up your painted material, select the image menu item, and then save as image. Once you save it, you then have to open the saved image in the image texture box. I have no idea why Blender doesn't auto save these files, but it doesn't and if you intend to come back to the project at a later date you have to save all of your paints before saving the project and exiting.
aneroph Hey, thanks a lot man! Worked out perfectly! I'm using Blender v. 2.73 and am contemplating updating to either 2.75 (stable) or the 2.76 rc2...IDK yet. Just concerned about all of my addons not being included in the upgrade. I know how to save my user settings but my Preferences, including add-ons didn't come back when I tried to upgrade and reverted back with a restore. Any opinions or advice on that would be another great help! Thanks for your help man!
+aneroph Ok when i go to Node editor i dont have the 2 boxes at the behining.My Node editor window is totally empty and i cannot click on anything from the add buttom below.What im doing wrong?
Sounds like you forgot to add a material to the object first. Click on the material tab and add a new one. This will bring up the two boxes. If you have already done this then it is because you are in the world node editor. Look in the node editor window at the bottom until you find a button that looks like earth. There is a cube button right next to it you must click on.
+ninorokr The easiest way to do this is to be in object mode, hit alt+a and apply the scale, then add a bevel modifier at 5mm. I say 5mm because I have Blender set to metric standards which you can do by clicking the scene tab and changing it from Blender or Imperial to Metric. Another way would be to add a subsurf modifier, but you will probably have to add some loop cuts to the nut in order to make it look right.
I used the bevel modifier but it barely makes any change, It's not very effective probably because of the way the nut is modeled. The subsurf did help some, though. Thanks! (Sidenote, isn't alt+a to playback animation, maybe you meant something else)
You're right, sorry. I meant ctrl+a not alt. The bevel modifier just takes the harsh edges and rounds them very slightly. It usually isn't meant for big changes.
Hey,this tutorial really helped me for making worn out metallic textures in blenderI have one question though and it may sound stupid,How did you get the scratch brush? did you make it yourself and if so can you make like a download link for it or show how to make it?
Any image saved as a .png file can be used as a brush. I made a tutorial for this in one of my Gimp editing segments. You can use any photoshop or Gimp brushes in Blender if you just make a transparent background, slap the brush down, then save it as png. You can also find large resources of them by looking through blenderartists.org and searching for brushes
Oh ok,but for your scratch brush you used to make the scratches on the object did you just make circles in a lets say paint program and then make it transparent or did you find it online so to say?(sorry if this can be annoying,im fairly new to blender and texturing)
They are free Gimp brushes I used. I opened Gimp (which is also free by the way) set the layer to transparent, placed on brush, fit the canvas to fit the brush, then saved it as a .png file. You can do this with any number of brushes or designs that you come up with or that others give out for free.
Hey also,do you know how I can fix a problem where a certain part of my object wont get painted? most of it is being painted no problem at all but just one side refuses to have color on it
+Muhammed AYDIN (maydin) I did this on purpose. It will automatically use UVs when an image texture is present and I had no desire to resize the image with a mapping node, so I did not need to connect the Texture coordinate node. Connecting it would yield the exact same results as leaving it unconnected. Now, if the displacement had been too large or too small then I would need a mapping node and the mapping node always requires an input from a texture coordinate node.
dude u should go further on this and get some mentorship for it or something. As much as u say how lazy and unexperienced u are the more I found your instructing methods and skills to be so comprehensive and entertaining. :D
Let me ask u something, Do you know if most people paint their models ike u did on video or most people import their uv's for a editing software like photoshop?
Actually a little of everything. There are far better programs out there for painting 3D models than blender, but those programs can only go so far. Some textures will work better using photoshop, others will work better using something like ZBrush to paint the model, and usually a little painting and blending at the end in Blender to get the final result.
This works really awesome except when I go to the final render with F12 none of the textures show up. "Rendered View" in the 3D View is fine... just no final. I may be committing some horrible n00b mistake here!
Michael Adams There are a lot of things that could be causing this. Let's start with the easiest one first. Do you have a sun lamp pointed at your object? The absence of light could cause it to look like there are no textures applied.
aneroph Hi! No, I've got a sun lamp... in fact, other than the nut object I followed the steps exactly like you have it in the tutorial. The final F12 render is just the plain vanilla "no material" gray that Blender defaults to. I'm using 2.75, that might be part of it.
Can you screencap a picture of your nodes and post a link to it? It would knock out a large portion of the problems that could have occured if I can see it is correct. This could be a case of a misplaced image, a forgotten unwrap, or the wrong mix node used.
The blend file will end up importing into a lot of my native settings which won't allow me to figure out exactly what went wrong. We'll save that for a last resort.
Just a question... why don't you use a fresnel or layer weight input node as factor for the mix shader at around 26:00? I mean, many tutorials I have seen used those for metals, do you think this is wrong, maybe because this is scratchy and not shiny? I just started with blender in January, so I am asking a lot of questions... also English is not my native language, so I probably have a bucketload of typos in here.
Rikka Piko Haha your English is great! I personally don't feel that Fresnel or layer weight nodes are needed for metal objects unless it is a solid metal color. It affects the way light is reflected on an object in relation to the camera, and it doesn't give any realistic value to any metals that are not super shiny and solid gray colored. Those nodes are fantastic for making cloth materials though!
Thanks for your thoughts- and for your compliment on my English (a year in Canada did help, but it's been a while). I want to go into the npr- area of things and the great Maiko project also makes use of fresnel a lot. I think he said to use it for any material. His tip with mixing toon and diffusive/ glossy shaders was a great help. But fresnel sometimes doen't give that much of an edge, I thought so myself and the real fresnel of silver (0,18) looks really, really bad. Also vielen Dank an Dich! (Thank you very much)
Rikka Piko I was a lot like that when I first started doing Blender projects on my own. I wanted the materials to be scientifically accurate like with density and IOR and fresnel, but at the end of the day, a lot of it doesn't make a noticeable difference or in some cases is completely wrong. At the end of the day, what you end up with is art and art has no limits except the imagination. Discover what makes your art special and keep doing it :)
Thanks, yes, this seems to be the case. It might help that I did a tiny bit of digital painting before going into blender. (If you haven't giving up on that, try this site: www.ctrlpaint.com/ they have an awesome (free!) library of really cool lessons on digital painting, loved it and worked through it for weeks). I am trying myself on the first texture paint project (will give you the link afterwards, if you'd like) and I noticed the hard way that before I start a new material, I have to safe the first image texture as an image first (or it will be gone). Also it seems hard to get a smooth stroke on imported brushes, even though I got the spacing down to 1%...
Do you have experience to make game assets with this method? I mean texturing with mask (hand painted) in game engine? I think that let's optimize model for game.
