Beginners Guide To Texture Painting In Blender

When creating a texture that is dependant on the specific shape of the object to exist, UV maps are 2D projections that prime our 3D objects with the process of texture painting.

When an object has a Uv map the next step will be to create a material for the same object. Textures require uv maps for positioning but they will also require materials for application.

The next step will be to create a blank image texture in the texture paint workspace, which will act as the base for your main texture as you paint it. This can be of any resolution of colour of your choosing.

Even though the texture may have been created in the texture paint workspace it is yet to be applied to the material. One method of doing this is to create an image texture node in the shading workspace.

In this video we cover the basic application of using the draw brush to begin painting onto our textures in the image editor. We will learn how to change the colour, adjust the size of the brush and also its strength.

A quick way of finding the exact colour that you want for the selected brush is to use the eyedropper tool. this is great if the colour you want already exists somewhere on the texture or anywhere in the viewport.

The texture is positioned onto the uv map of the object, but actually in practice it is the reverse. The UV map is positioned on the texture and can be adjusted to change the look of the texture on the model.

There are of course other brushes that we can use. For example if we want to smooth the transition from one colour to another then we can use the soften tool, and for grabbing colours and displacing them we have the smear tool.

Up next we have the fill tool which can be used to fill entire areas based on a single colour. It is also a great way of filling the islands created by the smart uv project tool.

If there is one important piece of advice that you should remember, it is that images and image textures are saved separate from the main file. Make sure to save your image before you close down your project to maintain it.

This lecture highlights that we will be moving on from the basic cube and looking at the real world application of texture painting for objects in a scene.

There are different methods for creating UV maps put if you are going to be painting in 3D rather than 2D then the quickest method of getting a suitable map is to use the smart uv project option.

With the uv maps set up for each of the objects in our scene we then need to ensure that all of the objects have a material as well.

With the setup almost complete we now need to create the base textures and attach them to the materials of our objects.

With everything set up and ready to go we can now begin the process of painting textures. With our tree object we can give it a base colour for the leaves and base using the fill tool, and add some snow by painting white on the top.

More complicated objects can be difficult to texture paint as you can often paint where you don't need to. With masking we combine edit mode with texture paint to isolate the areas of the object that we want to paint.

If we want to get a bit more sophisticated with our paint tools. We can change the blend type of the brush to change how the brush colour reacts with the base colour of the object and we can even apply a gradient of colours depending on pen pressure when using a graphics tablet.

In this video we will look at ways in which we can improve on our painted textures by combining our paint tools like the draw, soften and smear tools to improve our created textures.

We can create our own brushes using procedural textures like the cloud and noise textures, to create randomized patterns and apply them to the objects.

Congratulations on completing the class, to finish things off we have our end of class challenge to test the skills we have learned in this class and put them to use.