Blender 3D: Deep Dive Into Texturing

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Remington. I'm an animator in Silicon Valley and I also run SouthernShotty3D where I teach people how to use Blender 3D to produce animation and artwork. Here, we're going to be diving into texturing with Blender. These skills are necessary for anyone looking to pursue through your career. This includes skills used in game design, film, motion design, and more. This course assumes you are familiar with Blender and will move at a fast pace. If this is your first time, I recommend checking out my, your first day in Blender course, which covers the basics of opening Blender for the first time. In other beginner classes, I explain how to model your first character, how to animate characters, and how to bring your illustrations to life. We'll be painting this character while learning the texture and workflow and Blender. You'll learn the tools, PBR materials, and tricks to speed up your workflow. Feel free to follow along with the classic example or make your own. Let's get started. 2. Project Overview: I've included this model fully UV unwrapped so you can use it to fall along. I've also included a few materials in the projects which we'll be using throughout our texture and process. The scene also includes a lighting setup which you can toggle on and off in the outliner. If you'd like to render your final project and the scene when you're done, just turn on the collection and hit "F12". The includer model is from another one of my Skillshare classes on how to model. However, if you would like to follow along with your own model, all the same techniques will apply. You can also buy or download a free model from a resource website like CGTrader if you want to try a different style than the included model. I would also like to point out that I'll be utilizing time lapses in this course to fast-forward through some of the slower painting portions. I won't fast-forward through any new techniques are things that I don't cover prior to the time-lapse, and I'll also speak over the time-lapse to give you more information on texture painting. I've also included a link to a place you can download texture for free if you'd like to use some of your own textures in this process. However, I've included everything we will need for this course packaged into the project file for you to use. 3. PBR Materials: Throughout this class, we'll be using PBR textures. PBR stands for physically-based rendering and is the standard industry texture format. PBR textures were invented by Disney to bring uniformity to their materials across scenes. Previously, the computer had no way of knowing what type of material an object was and it was up to texturing and lighting artists to ensure materials appeared in the same across the film. With PBR textures, we get a series of textures and inform the computer of various attributes on an object, such as it's roughness, metal height, color, and other elements depending on the material. The computer looks at all those maps and one shader node and then uses that to generate the material. The material will react based off of these maps and any lighting scenario. What this means is that you have a metal robot with a glass face, those materials were [inaudible] realistically and consistently in any scene setup. There are two main formats of PBR textures: specular workflows and metallic roughness workflows. This determines the type of maps needed to create the material. Metallic roughness is more common and what blender uses. This class we'll be focusing on the texture painting, not greening PBR materials, but we will be painting into some of these maps. Here are the maps you need to know for this class. The diffuse texture controls the color of an object. This is sometimes called the albedo or colormap as well. The roughness map controls the roughness of an object. White areas will be non-reflective and black areas will be fully reflective. Metallic maps determine metal ness. White is non-metal and black as full metal. Height map controls the displacement or height of an object. They can also be used as a bump map. White is the highest point and black is the lowest point. Now let's look at some UV unwrapping basics. 4. UV Basics: I'll have the shortcuts displayed in the bottom right here so that you can follow along. However, it is important to notice that I have some custom key. I have tab for toggle, apply menu turned on, and I have pressed A select all the toggle and then for spacebar, I have it set to search. That's the only differences I have. I find this to be an easier workflow to use and I recommend you change yours to the same. I've already unwrapped this model for us to paint, but let's take a brief look at what UV unwrapping is. This is not a comprehensive deep dive or tutorial into UV, rather a basic overview. UV unwrapping is the process of unwrapping our model into a 2D space so we can apply textures. As an easy way to grasp the concept is to look at how this cube is unwrapped. I like to explain it as if it's you had to peel the top layer of an object to use as a sticker for its texture. You unwrap a model by entering edit mode, selecting your mesh, and pressing U. These are the few options here. But let's look at the two main ones. Unwrap. This requires you to manually enter seams to unwrap. A seam is anywhere your map will split. An island is anywhere where your seams have detached from one another. You can add seams in edit mode by selecting edges then going to mark seam. You can remove them by selecting Clear seam. The texture will cut anywhere you place the seam. Seams will likely be visible at times. It's best to hide them in places you're less likely to look like creases, backs, or bottoms of objects. When unwrapping, you want to avoid stretching. You can view stretching by turning it on at the top of the menu here, Blue is good, then as it transitions to red, which means that the stretching is getting worse. The UV map shows all the space here on your texture map. You want to avoid stretching because it can smear your texture. For example, one small polygon on your paint could end up taking all your texture space, meaning the rest might look low resolution and blurry. It's best to place seams on areas that will make it easier to peel the geometry away without tension. For example, adding edge loops under an armpit or creased area will help it unwrap easier. You can cut entire pieces off using seams to form islands and relieve tension. For example, I cut the arm piece off here to separate from the wrist to give it more room on the texture map. Unfortunately, this is hard to explain. It's best to get in there with a bunch of models and look at how they split up their UVs and get in there to play with yourself. After a few models, it'll feel natural and easy to choose seams. Lastly, we want to avoid islands touching, as this will cause a UV overlap. Since two pieces are competing for the same area, you'll end up painting two areas of your model at once, which can lead to frustrating visual artifacts. Next up we have smart unwrap. When you use smart unwrap, it'll be best guess how to unwrap your object. It's not as good as manually unwrapping, but usually works most of the time for your needs as long as you're not working on a production pipeline with other artists. I like to bump the island margin up a bit to make sure there's no overlap. This just adds a tiny bit of space between all of the islands. Now that we've covered UVs, let's take a look at the texturing tools. 5. Texturing Interface: We're going to do a very quick overview of some of the tools we'll be using in this class. We'll be using them more in depth in this class. I've linked the manual if you want to see every single little setting description of free features infrequently used. But let's first take a look at the texture tools. The withdrawal tool which will let to paint on your object. Soften has the ability to blur or sharpen your images where you paint. The blur mode is great for blending edges. Smear works like the smudge tool on Photoshop, it smears around the pixels. This can run slow, so be careful when using large brush sizes that will smear a lot of pixels. Clone let you copy colors from images. Fill will fill the entire layer and can also be used to put down gradients. Here we have the brush settings, which is where we'll spend most of our time. We can change our radius, our strength, and our blend mode here. The little buttons on the side toggle pin tablet pressure sensitivity on and off. Usually, you'll leave blend mode on the default mixed mode. However, there's an option to change it to other modes if needed. Memorize the shortcut F, as this will allow you to change your radius while painting and it'll be a much faster process. We have the color picker, another shortcut to memorize is the color picker, S. This will allow you to pick colors and it's good for blending. Next to our colors, we have the option for gradient as well. This will allow us to click and drag to add a gradient into whatever layer you are working on. The color palette allows you to pick colors and save them for later use here using the little plus and minus keys. We can turn on and off symmetry down here. If your model is symmetrical, this will work. It will marry your pain across the selected access assuming your model's topology is mirrored, sometimes on by default, but I prefer to work with it off. Texture allows us to paint in a texture. By default, it will overlay that texture from whatever view you're in. Down here we have options to change how the texture is mapped. The two most common ones are tiled and stencil. Tile will repeat the texture and let you continue to paint assuming it's seamless. The stencil allows you to rotate, move, and scale an image, and then paint where needed. This is amazing for logos, you can move with the right mouse button, scale with the shift and right mouse button, or rotate with the control right mouse button. Texture mask allows you to import a mask or your brush and adjust the angle, pressure mapping, and randomness to create a brush yourself. Stroke settings define the way strokes are used in the viewpoint. There are a lot of settings here, but the most important ones are spacing, which determines how far apart your brush dots are, and jitter, which adds randomness to the position of your brush and civilization stroke. Stabilized stroke is great if you're on a mouse and don't have access to a walk on board as it helps smooth out your stroke by trailing behind the brush. Fall off determines the softness of your brush edges. We can use the presets down here. I mostly use the default soft brush and the hard line brush over here. Lastly, down here we have the option to change how our cursor is displayed. Feel free to play with this until you find something you like. I just keep mine on default. 6. Assigning Materials: These will be in the default project files, so there's no need for you to do this if you don't want to. However, I encourage you to try it yourself as well, as this is common practice when texturing your characters. On the right here we had the Material panel. We can create slots for our character and then assign materials from the drop-down menu here. You can use the same material in different slots if you need. We can assign materials to parts of our model by entering Edit mode and clicking "Assign" with the current selection. We can also remove and select based off our materials here. Let's go ahead and assign some material source to our character. It's best to split up a bit based on size. If we use one material for everything, we'll either end up with blurry textures because we have to spread that image across the entire model, or we'll have to create a giant image that will slow down our machine. It's best to split up objects across smaller resolutions. I use 4k textures for larger elements such as the entire body or face. Then I try to use 1k or 2k textures for accessories and smaller selections. If you're on a lower-end machine, I recommend keeping it to 1k textures. Here are the resolutions you should use, and quickly here are the final texture selections that I've created for hair, backpack, shirt, pants, glasses, glass, shoes, skin, and accents. 7. Texturing the Hair: We're ready to begin actually texture painting our character now. Before we dive into painting on here with brushstrokes and stuff, I want to show you a quick trick we can do for this hair so that we can add some visual interests without actually diving in there and doing paint strokes. We're going to use the IOR factor here, which stands for index of refraction, which will affect how the light appears over the material in terms of the edges versus the center of the object. What we can do is use that it gives us a little bit of edge on our hair. As I mentioned before, I've gone ahead and pre-loaded portions of these textures to save you time. First of all, we'll do is we'll go ahead and we're going to switch our view port shading. There's a couple of different ways we can do that. You can press the "Z" key, which is what I prefer to do or you can come up here and tap the little Material tab. Now this won't give you an exact representation of the materials as this is just a material preview. If you want an exact representation you need to look at the render view but we'll be using the material view for the most of this course because it's much easier on smaller machines. Now what we're going to do is go ahead and choose a color for our hair. I'm going to go ahead and do the same as the preview render I've done, which is going to be more of a red for the hair. I find that looks pretty good there. Then that what we want to do is add just a bit more interesting. Before we move any further, we will be using a free add-on packaged with Blender. You may already have an enabled, but if you come up here to Edit, Preferences, Add-ons, and then you search node, you'll see this node wrangler here. If it check that, you'll be able to follow along because we'll be using a lot of shortcuts from that. It should really just be enabled by default. Let's go ahead hit Shift A here, click Search. We're going to search for mix, and then we're going to choose mix RGB, and that's going to allow us to choose two colors there. Now, one cool trick a lot of people don't know is you can go ahead and you hit Control C over this. You hover with that, press Control C. You can paste that here. I'm going to paste that into both of those. Now, first what I'm going to do is choose a bright color here like green. Then I'm going to move this into the color node here. You'll see first that what it's doing is mixing the green and the orange here, the factor here. You see this is blending between the two. If I go ahead here and search Fresnel, that'll give me the IOR value here and I can actually plug that into my base color to see what it's doing here. That will take a minute to load. You can see how it's creating this dark edge around the back there. Then if I move this, you can do whatever you think looks best to you. Now what I'm going to do is plug this color back into here. We're going to move this Fresnel back here. We're going to pluck this factor and plug it into the factor here. You'll see that we'll get this orange with these green coming in. Then I'm going to hit Control C here and then Control V to copy that back. That just allows me to get a good starting point. Then now what I'm going do is click this hue slider here and then I can go ahead and move this around. I'm going to move this all the way around. It was originally over here. I'm going to move it over here to give it a bit of a cooler color, but not too much. I'm going to maybe raise that value just a little bit. With that, we're ready to begin moving onto how to texture the skin. 8. Texturing the Skin: Now I've included a free skin texture in the project file. The skin texture allows you to adjust the scale of the skin so let me zoom in here. If I change this down to 0.5, you can see that those skin pores are getting quite a bit bigger. It also allows you to change the skin color so you can choose your tone of skin there. Then down here I have the subsurface color and subsurface settings. Sub-surface settings will turn on subsurface scattering, which means that if light hits the back of these ears it will shine through in order to come through this color down here. This is off by default and I recommend leaving it off unless you're on a more powerful machine because it's actually pretty computer intensive to calculate. I'm going to start my character with more of a fairer skin tone. What we're going to do is we're going to look at how we can add some blush and how we can adjust skin pores and other things to get this skin looking more realistic because you can download my skin texture anywhere online. But how you utilize that skin texture can really sell your character. What I'm going to do is maybe give them a fair skin tone since I went with a red hair that'll match a bit better so make sure your going to take this skin here. Just give it a light, peachy look. You can choose whatever skin tone you want. All the techniques that we're using will work across skin tones. You just may need to adjust the hue values a bit to accommodate. Here you can see we have a peachy skin. Now what I'm going do is go ahead and go into my UV image editor. I'm going to go ahead and grab this. What we're going to do is switch this to UV editor and make sure that we have that setup and we're going to tab into edit mode here. Now what we're going to do is play with the size of the skin pores. I've set five as my defaults skin pore, and that's so that I have just these tiny little skin pores and skin texture all around our character here. But there are certain parts of the body that actually have larger pores. In this example, we're just going to use the nose a bit. What we can do is we can tab into edit mode on our character here, and what we're going to do is go ahead and select our nose. I'm going to press L, and in my case I have the nose as a separate object. If you need to grow your selection, you could go ahead, maybe switch to vertices mode there, grab one vertices and then hit "Control Plus" until it selects the entire nose. Now I have the entire nose selected here, what I'm going to do is come over here to our scale on the island here, and I can scale this up and down to change the size of the skin pores. I'm just going to zoom in here and the smaller I make this, the bigger those pores are going to get. I'm going to go ahead and scale this down to about 1/4 of this size. That's just going to give me slightly bigger pores on the nose. Just a little bit more texture on the nose, which will help sell some of the realism. I'm going to go ahead and drag this down here and then what we're going to do is we're going to add an image node. I'm going to hit "Shift A" here and then I'm going to search up here for image. I see we get image texture there. Then now we're going to utilize this texture to pink color on top of our skin. What we're going to do is we're going to click "New" here but before we do that, we want to utilize our skin color. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to grab this color. If I hover over this corner and press "Control C", what I'll do is I'll copy that color into my palette. Now I'm going to come over here, I'm going to click "New" and we need to choose the size. Now, I feel like you could do 496 with us if you want to do close ups and what not, I'm going to do 2048 for the sake of performance. That's a 2K texture and I'm going to call this skin details. Then now because we have that color copied into our color palette, what we can do is hover over this and hit "Control V" and that will paste that color. Now if I hit "Okay" there and I drag this color in here, you should see that there'll be no difference after it reloads. Now that we have this, we can go ahead and begin painting some details into our character. What we need to do is we need to think about the places on our character where the skin may look a bit different. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take these glasses here. I'm going to press "L" over these glasses like that and select everything I'm going to set H and that'll allow me to see our face there. Generally on a face, things like your nose and your cheek are going to have a different color as are your ears. Those things tend to chill first so on fair-skin like this all rose up and be a little bit redder, and then you can adjust that according to whatever skin tone you're going for. Down here on the hands and the arms, usually around the elbows and the knuckles where you get a lot of grips and stretching, you'll get a bit of red there too. Now before we begin diving in here and painting, I want to point out that it's best to start big and then move small. What I mean by that is we'll start with big, broad brushstrokes with very low opacity, and then we're going to move into smaller brushstrokes to increasingly insert our detail until we get it down to where we want. Let's go ahead and hop into texture paint mode. You can do that a couple of different ways. If you turn on tap reply menu, you can just tab into texture paint or you can come up here to Edit Mode and do texture paint there. But before we do that, we only want to affect the skin. What you want to do is select everything on your character that has the skin texture because that's what we're going to be painting right now. Now in our case, I've already applied the skin texture in this project file to the portions that I want to have skin on it. If not, you can go ahead and manually select things using the L select method or just clicking and dragging until you select everything. For now what we can do is just grab the skin here. I'm just going to go ahead grab "Select" and that will select all my skin. Then we're going to hit "Control I" and that will invert the selection, and then I'm going to hit "H" and that'll hide everything. Now what I'm going to do is nothing is selected, so I'm going to go ahead and select that again, and that'll make sense in a moment. Then we're going to tab over here to texture paint mode. Then what we're going to do is turn this on right here, which is a paint mask. If I click paint mask, what that will do is mask it so that the hidden selection matches that in the edit mode, and also I can't paint anything if it's not selected in the edit mode. That way we don't accidentally paint onto our other objects. Now that we have that, what I can do is go ahead and close this because we're not going to be looking at that for a while. We can go ahead and open our tool sets here. We're going to press "End" and open this panel click" Tool" up here. You want to make sure that you have skin selected here as your material, and then down here out of all the maps in there we want to make sure we have skin details, and that means that we'll be painting on that skin details texture that we did. You can see here that you can select any material and any map within that material. You just want to always double-check that you're painting on the correct material. Now let's go ahead and begin painting some details here on our character. I'm going to go ahead and make sure that I'm on the draw brush here. I have the default brush settings here, and I'm just going to go ahead and turn this down to 0.25. Then I'm going to look at this color here and we should still have the color copied into our palette. We should be able to just hit "Control V" here, and that allows us to get to our skin there with a starting point. Now what we can do is take that skin and maybe move it down just to redness, just a tiny bit there. Then of course, whatever skin tone you have, make the adjustments accordingly, define a color value that offsets it. But generally when you're adding blush, no matter what skin tone, it's going to be darker and it's going to push towards the cooler side of the color wheel here. With that, we now can go ahead and begin painting onto our character. If we go ahead and paint here, painting in some just broad strokes there for rosiness of the cheeks. Then I'm going to just rotate over here add a bit more for the cheeks we'll focus on the nose in a second. What this is going to do is give us, our character a look. Almost like they're just running outside in the cold and I'm going to begin painting that in the nose, and I'm just rotating around with shift middle mouse button and all mouse button. I'm sure most of you know how to navigate the view port by this point and just go ahead and paint on her nose there. You can see here that I'm just going to moving around, making sure I get all those crevices. I'm going to do is come back down here to the color of our brush so grab here, grab the brush there. I'm going to go ahead and leave it at that redder color I had for the nose, because for the ears, we're going to paint around the edges here, as you can see, I already accidentally painted those a little bit and give our edges a little bit of a redness there. That's because they usually hit the cold or the weathering elements and they get a little bit redder around the edges. What we can do is begin painting around those edges, and then we'll move down here to our oboes and whatnot, which you can see I accidentally already hit, so we'll just smooth that out and fix that in a second. Before we continue, I'm going to talk a bit about UV maps and some of the dangers there when doing this. There's any overlaps here it can cause some glitches. If you remember in the beginning, what we did is we selected the nose and we scaled that nose down in the UV editor so that we could get a larger pore. Let's say that you already have this. If I go ahead and scale it down, you can see that if I move this over here, what it can do is start creating some of these harsh lines. If I go ahead and grab this leg UV here, and I take that and move that over here where my nose is, you can see it's picking up the texture of my nose. That's just something I want to point out that as you're working, if you notice that you're painting in one area and you see it's starting to appear elsewhere, you may want to check your islands and make sure that they're not overlapping if you're having those types of issues. That being said, let's move forward and look at how we can do some skin defects. What we're going to do is go ahead and tap back into texture mode with everything selected here. What we're going to do is actually create a new brush. So what we can do is we can just name this brush basic. Let's go ahead and click here. Create a new brush and we'll call this one freckles. Now what we're going to do is take our color here and you can pick whatever color that matches your skin tone. For freckles, I'm going to go ahead, wound mine over here into the orange area and drag that down until we get a brownish color there. I'm going to take my strength may be and make that 0.75 and then see what that looks like. That looks like it'll be a good freckle tone. Then what I'm going to do is come down here to the falloff. Freckles tend to have a much sharper fall off so we don't want it to be so fuzzy. Maybe something along those lines, so I'll go ahead and click this little preset right here, the second one. Then what we can do is come up here to our brush settings and mess around with those settings under the stroke here. You can see here for the spacing that we have 10 percent and that means that each brushstroke is there, you can see each one is only about 10 percent behind the other. But if we go ahead and set this up to something like 100, and let's go ahead and press "F" and scale in our brush here. If I start dragging, you can see we're starting to get some spacing. Let's add a little bit more. Let's do 200 and see what that looks like. We're starting to get a little bit more of a pathway there. Now what we can do is introduce some jitter so I'm going to take this here, I'm just going to crank this all the way up to two. Then as I drag you can see we're starting to get a book more random. With that we can go ahead and begin moving around and just adding some freckles. Now, depending on what you're going for, of course you can add them wherever you see fit. Here with freckles, they tend to be mostly concentrated, especially when you're doing a stylized character like this around the nose a bit and then on the cheeks, that's where I'm going to focus mine. Then maybe just a couple here though to just add a bit of realism to the rest of the skin. It's important to tell a story with your textures. This will take your textures from good degree. What does telling a story in a texture it mean? Let's give some examples. It can be as simple as wear and tear. For example, with our backpack hit here, we could assume he might be an adventurer. We can paint in wear and tear on his boots, maybe some stains on his clothes and eventually add some scrapes to his skin. This will help convey the story that this is an adventurer. If we had pots and pans, we could add some scratches to the roughness of the bottom of the inside of a pan, and some scotch burns on the bottom of the outside of the pan. If we had a book we could add some wear down on the binding of the book and maybe a name written on it. These little details add up to make your objects feel alive. Contribute to the world-building of your place and we'll really elevate your artwork above the rest. That's a quick way that we can do skin on our characters, but for now that's all I'm going to do on this character. 9. Texturing the Clothes: Next up, we're going to look at how we can texture these clothes. You'll see that in some of these, I already have some textures on there, and on those, we'll be learning how to paint in some of the colors and add some patterns, but on some of these other ones like the shoes, you'll see that we don't have anything. That's because I'm going to show you how to manually import some of those PBR textures. Let's come down here and we're going to go ahead and choose our file browser over there. Now, if you've downloaded the course project files, you should see something like this, and you'll see that we have a leather folder and a sock folder. We're going to start with the sock folder here and see that we have a couple of maps there that we can drag in. Then up here, we just have our Shader editor. What we're going to do is we're going to come up here. We have our shoes and our pants and our other options, and we're actually going to create a new one for our socks. Let's go ahead press the "Plus" button here. I'm going to type in New there, and then we're going to type in Socks here, and this will give us a new material with a principled BSDF node, which we can use to plug all of our maps into. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to grab our object tab into edit mode here. We're going to grab our two socks here. We're going to press "L" over that one, "L" over that one, and just assign. We'll assign this sock material to those socks there. You'll see now that the previous material has been taken off. If we go ahead and change this base color, you can see that it's affecting our socks. Now, what we're going to do is go ahead and drag in all these options here. To drive this in, it can be confusing because if you click here, it won't drag, and you actually need to click over the little photo. What you do is you grab the little photo here and drag that in, and we have our color right there, then we can drag in this displacement here, which is the same as our height map. You can drag in this normal, and then we can drag in this roughness. I'm just going to go ahead and position these like so. Now, what we can do is we can plug all these maps into this node here which is like an Uber material, and that will create a material based off of these inputted maps. First up, we can drive the color into the color. By default, it's going to map to the UV. What we can do is add a mapping node. If we go ahead and add a mapping node here, you can drag this into each vector, and this will determine how this is mapped across our object. It'll just determine how the material displayed, and that'll make sense in a moment, and then we need to add a texture coordinate to tell this where to map things. If we go ahead and hit "Shift+A", click "Search", type in texture coordinate, hit "A" there, you can see we have options here to generate coordinates, normal UV and all these other options. That's a bit more than we're going to discuss today. We're just going to go ahead and drag UV into the vector here, and that'll make it use our UVs. One other thing we can do is mess with the scale which will change the size of our texture. You see here we have three options, that's called the vector map. We can just reduce that to one by adding a value nodes. If you go ahead and hit "Search" and type in value, grab value here, and drag that into there, and you can see that we can change the size of our image now. I'm going to go ahead and do mine maybe three, and you can see that it gives me a realistic size there. Now, for the roughness, all we need to do is drag the color into the roughness there, and you'll see here that it's imported as a color space with SRGB. What we're going to do is click that and do non-color. That's because we don't want color data for all of these, so we'll go ahead and do that with the remainder of these two. The only one you want color data on is the actual color. Great. Now, we can go ahead and drag that over there, and then what we can do is go ahead and add our normal. We can type Shift+A Search and type in normal, and you actually want normal map, and what we can do is drag it up here. What that's going to do is take this normal here which are the drivers and the base color. You can see that this is actually a purple texture, so we need to tell blender how to read it. There's normal map mode does that. If we drive that color into the color, drag that normal into the normal, then what that'll do is convert that into height information. You can see it's starting to look a little bit bumpy. If I bump this all the way up to 10, you can see it makes our socks a lot bumpier. Then lastly, we have the displacement, which can be used to actually add real-time geometry and actually make the geometry move in and out. We're not going to do that for this course because it's very computer-intensive and you want to try not do it. Again, we need a mapping node to turn this into height information, so we're going to hit "Shift+A", Search, and then we're going to search for a displacement node. Drag that up there. This time, rather than dragging it into the normal, we'll drag it into the height information, and then we're going to drag this displacement node here, and then that'll just give us additional displacement that we can use there. It works in conjunction with a normal map in this scenario. We're just going to leave that at the default for now. Lastly, if we want, we can actually adjust the color of the sock. One way you can do that is that because our image color is up here, we can go ahead and go to search, add a mix RGB, and we'll just click that over the image there. We're going to move this to the bottom node. We're going to turn this factor all the way up, and then we're going to do multiply. What that's going to do is it's going to take this image and multiply it on the color on top, and then we can add a color ramp. Let me go ahead and search again, add a color ramp and add. That here that will convert this image to a grayscale, and then we can grab this and we can change the intensity of it. I'm going to grab that white and drag it up there. Now, what we can do is choose whatever sock color we want here. I'm going to go ahead and maybe give him some light brown socks. Great. Now, you can see how we can manually use all these maps. Now, I'm going to show you a much quicker way to do it. What we're going to do is we're going to come over here to our shoes, we're going to grab our character here, and we're going to come up here, and we're going to find our shoes. You see that I've already created a node here. I'm going to grab this one, I'm going to drag this down, get rid of that window there. If you enabled Node Wrangler before, you can use the shortcut, you can click this node here, hit "Control+Shift+T", that'll bring up a menu here so that you can go in and select some files. What we're going to do is we're going to go here into textures. We're going to go here into the leather. I'm just going to select everything. Now, if you get an import arrow doing this, try unchecking relative path, and that'll sometimes fix that. What you do is you just click this button down here, and it will automatically attach all of those into the correct areas. Now, what we can do is go ahead and just add a search value node like before, and then we can adjust the scale of our shoe here. I'm going to go ahead and maybe make this A2. That looks great to me. Now, I want to go ahead and add some details to the leather down here. What we're going to do is just go ahead and add some material on top of there. What we'll do is we'll go ahead, hit "Shift+A", Search, look for an image texture node here, and we're going to create a new image texture. I'm going to go with just a 1080 by 1080 size, so I'm going to click "New" here, and it'll retain the color information from before. I want to make sure that we have Alpha checked on, because what we're actually going to do here is paint with nothing, and we're going to take this Alpha value and set this to zero. I'm going to go ahead and just set the color to black for good measure, then I'm going to go ahead and change this to 1080 by 1080, and then I'm going to call this leather cracks. I'm going to hit "Okay" there. Now, what I'm going to do is go ahead "Shift+A", Search, look for a mix RGB. I'm going to go ahead and grab that on top here, and then I want these other cracks to appear on top, so I'm going to go ahead and drag my color in there. Right now, because we have nothing in there, it's just going to display black as the Alpha, but what we can do is also do the Alpha as the factor here. You'll see that that takes away all the elements there. With that setup, we're ready to begin working on our leather crack. Let's go ahead. We're going to switch over to the UV Editor here so we can just see what we're doing. We'll go ahead and look at Leather Cracks, and we'll see right now it's empty. Now let's grab our object here and we're going to tab into Edit Mode here. Let's select these shoes. We'll see that those appear there. Let's go back to Texture Paint. We'll tab up here to Texture Paint, and we'll see here that also we see are the shoes. I'm going to go ahead and drag this window over since our focus is over here. We're going to press "N" to bring up our Tool Panel. Make sure we have "Shoes" selected and "Leather Cracks" selected. Right now we're on Freckles from last time. I'm actually going to click this and switch back to Basic and then make a new brush based off of Basic. I'm going to hit "New Brush" there. We're going to call this Cracks. I'm going to go ahead and save. Then what I'm going to do is scale up my brush there by pressing "F" and zoom in, and we'll come down here. We'll twirl up the Stroke settings, and we're actually going to go ahead and use a Texture Mask. We'll click "New" here and we'll call this "Cracks." Then we'll come in here to the Texture Tab and we'll see that we now have a Cracks texture, so we'll go ahead and select that. Then in the project files you've downloaded, you will find this Leather Cracks png, so we'll go ahead click that. That's going to give us some cracks there. Now after you've imported that texture mask there, you'll want to come up here to your Texture and it's automatically going to apply that to your texture, which we don't want. We're going go ahead and click "X" up here. We only want that on our texture mask. Now what'll happen is you want to make sure your mask mappings that they're tiled. That just means that when we zoom in here to paint, it'll begin painting over. You'll see that you barely see anything, and that's because these cracks are actually pretty tiny. If we come in here and scale our size down, let's go ahead and do 0.1, 0.1, 0.1. I just press "Tab" to get in between those and start painting on here. You'll see that these cracks start to show up. You can see as I scale in and out that brush, that we have that crack there. I can begin painting in those cracks around on my leather. Lastly, what I'm going to do, is we're going to actually go ahead and paint somewhere, like wear and tear is, so around the edges in here and things where we might expect more wear. But I'm actually going to get rid of my texture maps for that. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to just click "X" out of here, and that'll get rid of the texture mask, and now I can paint on there normally. I'm going to come down here to the Faloff, and I'm going to choose something a bit more rigid, like this preset here. Then now I'm just going to fast forward through as I've paint in some areas where we might expect to see some wear and tear. Make sure to save your image. I'm going to come over here, Save As, and then I'm just going to save the Leather Cracks into my Texture folder, so go ahead and save that there. Now, what I'm going to do is go ahead and fill this shirt. We'll go into our Shader Editor here. You can see here we have the shirt, build-upper, and we had nothing in our base color. We're going to go ahead Shift A, Search, Add an Image Texture. If you don't see this, just come over here to the Material Tab. Make sure you have the Shirt selected. We'll drag this color into the color there. I'm going to go ahead, click "New" here. We'll call this Shirt. Let's go ahead and we'll bump this up to 2048 by 2048 since this is a big option here, and we'll hit "Okay." Now, what we can do is we can go ahead and grab this Fill Bucket here and then let's go ahead and do a Gradient. We'll go ahead and come over here to the gradient. We'll click this color here and see that the black appears there. Let's go ahead and choose, for my case, I'm going to choose maybe a more of a warm yellow. Therefore that option then I'm going to click over here, and I'm going to go ahead and grab maybe more of a darker orange here. Before we apply the gradient, you may notice that the shirt doesn't appear here. If you Tab back out on the object mode, you just need to refresh that list. Tab back out the object, back in the texture and it should appear there, so just make sure you have your Shirt up here selected and your Image selected there. Then what we're going to do is we're just going to drag up here. You can see that that gives us just a little bit of color variety in that shirt. Let's go ahead and look at how we can go ahead and add a pattern to that shirt as well. I'm going to tab back out on the object mode here. I'm going to hit "Control S" and save there. What I'm going to do is drag this image up here, I'm going to go to Image Editor. I'm going to go ahead and select that Shirt that we just had, and I'm going to go ahead and save this into my Texture folders, just to make sure that we're saving everything we're working on. Now what we can do is go ahead and import a pattern. If you were following along and downloaded all the project files, you should be able to come here into the File Browser. Go into your Project Files and you'll find this Polka Dots png. We'll go ahead and we'll grab that, and we'll just drag that up into here. Now what we're going to do is move this down here, get rid of that window, we don't need that anymore. We'll do in MixRGB node, so we'll hit "Shift A", "Search", "MixRGB." Then what we're going to do is we're going to drag these polka dots into the factor because if I drag in another color first to show you, you'll see that it's actually a black and white image. We'll go ahead put that in the factor, and that factor will use the black and white data to determine how to mix these two. If I drag this into the Base Color here, you'll see that we get the color of our shirt and then color these gray spots where this color is appearing. Let me show you why that's pretty cool. What we can do is we'll drag this vector node up here, attach it to our polka dots. You'll see that it immediately begins to map it based on the rest. I'm going to leave mine at a scale of five, but you can go ahead and scale that down if you want those polka dots to be bigger or smaller. What I'm going to do now is choose my color down here. What we can do is do maybe a darker red there, or a brown-orange, and we can choose whatever color we want there. Next, what we're going to do is go ahead and just apply a color to the jeans down here. If you come here, click our "Pants" color. I've already gotten all this information in here. Then what we can go ahead and do is the same whole process, where you can go ahead add an image texture here. We should get a fill color of those pants. Then now what you can do is tab into Edit Mode, select our pants and tab in the Texture Mode. Make sure that we have our Pants selected and our Pants there, and then I'm just going to go ahead and go in and brush in some extra detail just like we had before, so I'm just going to go ahead and time-lapse through that. I'll also do for the pants, paint in some stitches and just add some variation in color to give it some wear and tear. You can go as detailed as you want there, but that's what I'm going to do for now. 10. Texturing the Glasses: Next up I'm going to show you how we can actually create a small basic material utilizing this principle of DSDF and show some of the flexibility there. What we're going to do is create a basic plastic material which we'll use for the rim of our glasses, and then we will reuse that, the [inaudible] itself. Now what we're going to do is grab our object here. Make sure you have glasses selected. We have our node here. We're going to drag up here, go to the file browser, and then we're going to navigate to our project files. Here you see I've created this thing called classes roughness map, and we're going to use this a couple of different ways. Let's go ahead. Let's drag this in here. Then we're going to go ahead and close this window up. That's all we need for now. What we're going to do is we're going to grab our base color here and choose a color for our glasses. I'm going to go ahead and do almost black. Then we have a specular value here. The higher we turn that up, the brighter it's going to be. I want these glasses to look shiny, so I'm going to turn my spec all the way up. Now, if we grab this glasses roughness map here, we can go ahead drag that into the base color and get an idea of what it's going to look like on our glasses. We're going to use this in the roughness map. What that's going to do is anything white will not be shiny, and anything black will be shiny. Let's go ahead and add our color ramps. We'll go Shift A Search color ramp. What this will do is convert our image here to this gray-scale color ramp. We could go ahead and drag this in. We'll see that that'll make so that most of our glasses are shiny and just these white parts won't be. Now what we can do is move this out of the color and move this into the roughness map. You can see here that we're starting to get portions of our glasses that aren't shiny. You go ahead and adjust that till you get something that you like. What that's doing is giving us just a wear and tear on the frame, which will just add a little bit of realism when we go ahead. That's pretty much all we need to do for this basic glasses material. But we can utilize this same node in order to make the glass here. You'll notice here that I have this glass set. What I'm going to do is actually go ahead and get rid of this there. I'm going to go ahead and choose glasses in that frame. You'll see that it'll apply that same glass texture to our glasses right here. But what we're going to do is create this button. What this button do, will do a new material from this material. If we click new material, and let's call this glasses, glass, these materials will now be separate from one another. If I go ahead and change this color here, you see that we now have created a material based off of that material. That's a quick way you can go about just creating one material and then creating variations. Now, what we're going to do is actually make this see-through for our glasses. We'll go ahead, grab our base color here. We're going to bump this all the way up to white and grab everything there. Put RGB all at one and that'll give us white. To see this we'll actually have to go into the render mode. What we're going to do is switch to render mode here. Now, if you're having a hard time getting this to render on your computer, then you may not be able to do this transmission section. This does take a bit more, so I'll show you what you can do here in a second. What we can do now is we can take this transmission, we'll turn this up to one. What that's going to do is turn our glasses into a glass material there. You can see how this roughness is affecting the roughness of the glass. I think that's a bit of an extreme effect. What it can actually do is scale this back a bit. By bringing this all the way forward, we'll get rid of some of those harsh reflections and get just a little bit of roughness variation by crushing that. That gives us some more realistic looking glasses that look like they've been stuffed up. Now, if your computer can't handle this transmission view, which is understandable, it's pretty hard, what you can actually do to fake it is we can go ahead, turn this transmission down. Then what we can do is maybe just turn the Alpha down a little bit to something like 0.05. What that'll do is, that'll give us see-through glasses that have reflections, but it won't be calculating realistic in glass and that's just a much quicker way to render. That's one way that you can do that as well. Now, the Alpha won't show up here in the view port, just know that that is to be expected. Now that we have that, we've created our glasses material and we can go ahead and move along to our backpack here. 11. Texturing the Backpack: Next up we're going to take a look at the backpack. Just go ahead, grab the backpack material here and we'll follow the same process of adding an image, moving it in there. Then as usual, make sure to save your image afterwards so that you don't lose those changes to your texture. As I'm time elapsing theorem, just going to talk a bit about color theory and how that can help you improve your texture painting skills. Let's take a moment to talk about colors, there are already a lot of classes online about color theory. I'm not going to go in depth, but rather cover the basics. For base color, consider the emotions colors about. Blue can be calming, green can be natural, red can be intense, orange can be warm, and so on. Consider what you want the base color of your textures to say about your character. After that, consider a full palette. When making your color choices, consider utilizing some basic color schemes. We have monochromatic, which is all in one color spectrum. We have analogous, which are three colors next to each other on the color wheel. With the complimentary, all colors are opposite of one another. Let's put complimentary is similar about two colors on the opposing side. Try it as a triangle. Selection on the color wheel, equally spaced out. Tetradic is four colors equally spaced on the wheel. There are great ways to begin choosing some opposing colors to your base. However, don't think about colors as one color for material. Consider mixing these colors into your materials. If you have an orange shirt, consider mixing its complimentary color, which would be purple into the shadows. Make it subtle. But mixing in these extra colors will really make your piece pop, and add a lot of extra life and interest to your textures. Next up we're going to take a look at our buttons here so we can have our buttons on our clothes here. I've created this button here, and what we're going to do is, we'll drag this out of view. Make sure you've saved your texture to make sure that you don't lose any of your changes there. What we're going to do is just give this a metallic look. We'll go ahead and zoom in here. We'll go ahead and we'll turn the metallic all the way up. What that will do, is make our buttons metal. Then we can adjust the roughness here if you want shiny buttons or if you want $ buttons. I'm going to set mine to something like 0.15, maybe 0.25, give them a little bit of roughness here. Then what I'm going to do is change the color. I want him to have more of a, maybe darker metal with maybe a little bit of gold. Then what I've gone ahead and done is I've applied it to those there and there. You can see now that we have these metal buttons all around. Lastly, for the backpack, we're going to look at our badges. You may have noticed this empty material slot down here. What we're going to do is utilize that to create some random colors. First of all, let's take our glasses material and reuse that one more time. We'll go ahead grab glasses there and we'll create new from this material. We'll call this badges. Already we've gotten this plastic sheen over all of our badges, which is exactly what we want. Now in the project file, when you download it, you'll notice that there's this badges up here. What this does is this has all the badges separated out into their own collection up here. That's because for this next part to work, we're going to choose a random color per object. It needs to be individual objects work to work. What we can do, is we can come up here and grab our badges material. We'll hit "Shift A" search. Let's pick a color ramp. Go ahead, grab this color ramp, we'll plug that into the color, and we're going to come up here where it says linear and change this to constant. What that'll do is make it so that each node here is exactly its own color. We'll go ahead and add another one. Let's just choose a couple of different colors. I'm going to choose three colors here. For this first one, we're going to choose maybe more of a muted yellow. Then for the second one, I'll choose more of a blue color and maybe a light blue there. Then for this last one, I'll go ahead and choose maybe a pink color, something to really stand out from the others. Great. Now we have three colors there. Then what we can do is we can feed in information here to make this randomly choose one for each object. Let's go ahead here at "Shift A", go to Search. We're going to look for the object info node. You'll notice here that there's this little random notch, We can grab that, plug that into the factor, and you'll see that that will randomly start picking colors for all of our badges. You can choose any color you want here, add as many colors as you want, and that will randomly assign them to each of the objects, which is a great, easy way to add a bit of randomness there. But let's take it up a notch and I'm going to go ahead and show you how we could go ahead and draw in all these badges too. Even though we have all this random information here, we can still go ahead and go to "Shift A" Search and we'll add an image texture. I'm going to go ahead new, and I'll leave this 1024 by 1024. Then what I'm going to do is go ahead and do badges here. We're going to grab my Alpha. I'm going to set this Alpha to zero. Click Okay, move this up here. That Shift A, Search and I'm going to look for a mix RGB node, go ahead, drag that in there. Plug this color on the bottom, with this alpha into the factor. Then now we'll be able to paint on top of our badges with their random colors. Now we have that setup, you could actually go through and begin painting little logos on each one of these. The only catch though, is that currently, because these are separated on in the multiple objects, Blender will not actually let you texture paint on multiple objects at once. The way you would just have to go about texture painting this is you would select, the one you'd like to texture paint, new tab and the texture paint node here. Then we'll go ahead and I'm just going to go ahead and grab a black texture paint there. I'm going to go ahead and just paint a little anchor symbol on here. As if they got a of boating badge or something like that. Then I have a tab out, I would grab another one, tab back and the texture paint. Then here I would add maybe a little heart. Then you can just go through, and begin painting your logos on each one of those. Make sure that you've saved out your badges texture file. As usual just want to make sure, those are always consistently saved. 12. Details: Lastly, what we're going to do is we're going to add some accent did details. You'll notice on my final render that had these just almost black lines that were painted all around for just stylized look. I'm going to show you how to do that in one material and how many materials you want to apply that to. It's up to you, but we're going to do it on the skin material. We're going to go ahead. Grab our skin material here and then come up here, change this to the shader editor. The interesting thing is I will also be painting into the bump map information. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and add a new image structure here. Let's go ahead, shift a search image texture. We'll make this one slightly bigger. We'll do New. I'm going to leave this as black, but the Alpha turned all the way down. But we're going to do this 2048 by 2048, and we're going to call this details. Great. Let's hit ''Okay'' there. Then what we're going to do is add a mix RGB node. Go ahead, add that down here. Plug our Alpha into the factor there or color into the color on the bottom there. But we're actually going to do another step with this. We're only going to play black and white information onto this detail image. What we're going to do is actually take this image here. I'll move it down here to make it a bit easier visually, and I'll move this material, I'll put down. Then what we're going to do down here is we're going to go ahead after we've moved this image down here and we're going to add a displacement node, and we're going to drag this Alpha into the height. We're going to drag this displacement into the displacement there. Now we're going to set this to negative 0.5. Then what that's going to do is anywhere that we paint here is going to create an indent. It won't show up in the material view here and there's a technical reasons for that. But for now, let me just show you how it looks in the render view. We can see here that in the render view, it gives us this appearance that it's almost pushing in to our character. That gives us a unique look when we're painting in these details. You can go ahead and decide how much you want that to go in so you could do a smaller number like negative 0.25 and then the effect won't be so drastic. What I'm going to do is switch back to material view. I'm going to ahead control undo a couple times to get rid of those paint marks. I'm going to leave my scale at negative 0.25, and then we're ready to begin painting details on her head. First of all, here in edit mode, make sure everything's deselected by pressing A. What we can do is grab our glasses and our glasses, glass, and we'll hide that. That just gives us a view of our face here. Down what I'm going to do is grab the skin, select the skin, and switch over to texture paint mode. With that, we're ready to begin painting. The details and textures really matter. If you remember earlier in the class, we talked about telling a story from our textures. A lot of times these details are what tell the story of your artwork. This last detail passe is what we will really add that level of realism to your scene. Even if you're going for a stylized look like in this case. The details can add elements of believability to your character. Sometimes it's good to take a break from your artwork before doing a deep fail fast. This will help you come back with a fresh perspective on what else may need to be added. These details will set your piece apart from others and prevent it from looking like a generic materials were applied to your object. Here are the final results of the character texture. Now, this is my second pass. Of course, I created this project once in promotion for the course, and then also once along side you. I did a bit things differently stylistically this time in terms of some of my color choices and patterns on the clothes and how I textured the face. However, I utilize the same techniques in both, and I'm including both project files. Now the original character pass I did was a higher resolution character with hair particles. That one takes quite a bit heavier of a machine to run. For this one, I made more of a simplified model with simplified textures to make it a bit easier for everybody to follow along. However, as I said, both project files are included. You can reference both and they utilize all the same techniques to get to the end result. 13. Outro: Thank you so much for watching my class, I'm excited to see what you make. Please post your projects on Skillshare so we can all see. If you would like to learn how to model this character, check out my modeling class on how to make your own. If you're curious how I made the hair, I also made a tutorial on my YouTube channel to promote this course. I have a link to that tutorial as well if you'd like to follow along there. Again, thank you for watching and I'm excited to see what you've made.