Hello and welcome to this workshop about stylized rendering using brushstrokes
In this video series
I want to walk you through how to use the brushstroke tools
that we just released with the Blender studio.
It's a free extension that you can get from the
extensions platform or download directly from within Blender itself,
In the user preferences. You're going to need Bender 4.2 and up for that to work.
But before we dive deep into the details of how to
layer brushstrokes using the add-on to create this scene,
let me give you a quick-start on how to
navigate the UI and get started using it right away.
So first of all, when opening the example file,
you're going to notice that you don't actually need the add-on to inspect the file.
The way that it is set up by default,
the add-on will make sure that all of the
resources it uses are appended into your blend file.
So if you use the file to send it to someone else,
it will always just contain all of the data necessary for the style to work.
But to actually make changes,
it's a lot more convenient if you have the add-on installed.
So let's do that first of all.
While recording this video, the add-on is not actually released yet.
But eventually, once that is the case, when you are watching this,
you will be able to just navigate to the 'Get Extensions' tab in the user preferences
and then search for brushstroke tools
and install the add-on from within Blender right away, if you enabled online access.
In case you can't or don't want to have online access from within Blender,
you can also just navigate to the extensions platform
and download the add-on directly from there
and then install it as a zip file
since the add-on isn't actually released yet.
That's also exactly what I'm going to do.
You can very easily do that by downloading the
zip and then drag and dropping it into Blender.
There you can select the repository that it should be installed in
and just press 'OK'.
And now you can see right away that a user interface
popped up on the right of the screen.
So let's take a look at the different elements that we can see there.
You will always be able to find the user interface for the brushstroke tools add-on
in the properties panel on the right of the 3D viewport, which you can open
by pressing the 'N' key and then it presents you with a bunch of different settings.
In this case we already have a user interface
for existing brushstrokes that we can navigate.
Depending on what object I have selected in the three view port,
I get a list of all of the corresponding brushstroke layers
to the object I selected. If I select this wall here for example,
you can see that there is a stone surface layer,
a spots layer and a moss layer.
And within this list, I can select them individually as well.
The surface object that is associated with these individual brushstroke layers
is shown at the top of the panel with the surface icon.
In this case, it's the
wall stones object.
So every brushstrokes layer always has a surface that it is attached to.
But let's zoom out for a second.
At the very top right of the panel, we have two buttons with the screen icon.
We can use these to disable and enable all
of the brushstroke layers in the entire scene.
So let's take a look at this file without any brushstrokes.
As you can see there's a big difference.
So most of what we've been looking at was actually
brushstroke layers that have been created using this add-on.
We can get them back by pressing the enable icon.
At this point I should also mention
that for a brushstroke heavy scene like this,
the add-on is quite computationally intensive.
So unfortunately, it does require a certain level of hardware
to be able to run it smoothly.
But for simple cases, you should be able to make it work with your hardware as well,
even if it's not that powerful.
But for now,
I'm going to just put that out as a disclaimer and assume that
your hardware is powerful enough to handle this kind of use case.
So now that you've seen how much of the scene is actually made up of brushstrokes,
let's try to navigate it a bit better.
As I already mentioned, brushstrokes are always attached to a surface
and you can see the list of the corresponding ones right here in the user interface.
You also get control over the visibility settings
and even their names using this user interface.
Since these brushstrokes are very likely to cover your entire scene,
it becomes a bit more difficult to actually select
the underlying surface object in the 3D view port.
For this reason,
there is a small surface button right here that will select the
surface object of the brushstrokes that you have selected right now.
If you want to move your object, for example,
you shouldn't do that to the brushstrokes themselves,
but to the surface object which they are parented to.
Next to that,
there's a big edit button to edit the current brushstroke
layer and a toggle to automatically jump into edit mode,
whenever you select one.
This just makes your drawing workflow simpler,
but by default, it's turned off.
And then up here, you have some additional settings, for example,
to duplicate a brushstroke layer or to delete it.
Some additional operators are in this drop down menu here
I skipped over it so far.
But how do we actually create a new brushstroke layer in the first place?
Let me use this cube object as an example.
When there are no brushstrokes associated to an object yet,
this whole panel here is empty and instead
you are just presented with these two buttons.
As you can see the surface object we have selected right now is the cube
and then we can either choose to add a 'fill' or a 'draw' brushstroke layer.
'Fill' will scatter a bunch of brushstrokes over the surface that you have selected.
And as you can see,
it automatically creates the brushstroke layer with a name that
is based on the base object that we used and brushstrokes.
Creating a new layer also automatically puts us into edit mode.
When I now press the draw button,
it will instead create a new draw brushstroke layer.
These two different types are fundamentally different
and the draw layer on its own doesn't add any brushstrokes yet
until we actually start drawing on top of the cube. For drawing,
the add-on comes with its own custom brushstroke draw tool
that gives you the ability to choose a color for each curve that you draw in
that is taken up by the brushstroke automatically.
And similarly to the drawing of the actual draw brushstrokes layer.
You can also control the fill layer
by pressing the 'Edit Flow' button
and then drawing in a flow direction.
Now, since I did this on a cube, there is not a lot of surface resolution to work with.
So let's quickly select surface object
go into edit mode and give this cube a bit more resolution.
Since the whole setup is procedural, you can go in and do that at any point in time.
And now if I go back clicking on edit flow,
you can see that we have pretty precise control [...]
over navigating the flow of the brushstrokes on the cube.
This way,
we can fill in the surface with a lot of precise
control a lot more quickly than having to draw everything manually.
For the new layers that you're creating there are also some advanced settings.
I'm not gonna go over those in detail now.
usually you should be fine keeping them as they
are or you can look at the documentation.
So let's get rid of the cube
and take a look at the existing brushstroke layers instead
to look at the remaining parts of the user interface.
When you have a brushstroke layer selected
below, you see three different tabs of settings for this brushstroke layer.
The shape tab represents the modifiers that are on your brushstroke object.
You can find the same ones in the actual properties panel as well,
but here they are presented in a more convenient and simplified way.
This brushstroke
layer here has two geometry nodes modifiers with a
bunch of different settings that are organized in panels.
I won't go over all the individual ones,
but usually they should be pretty intuitive to understand.
And I have descriptions for you to read up on what they do
and you can always just play around and
see what happens when you change the parameters.
By default
this presents you a simplified view with only the more important settings.
But to get a full overview of this modifier's capabilities,
you can toggle the UI options setting at the top right here.
This will show you that there's actually more to this
modifier stack than we've just seen on the right.
You can pin and unpin modifiers, panels and individual
settings to remove them from the user interface.
By default,
there are actually a bunch of panels that are
not shown when you add a new brushstroke layer.
For example,
there is a more advanced stroke calling panel that can
be used to remove brushstrokes outside of the camera view.
And you can just press this pin button to
show the panel and its individual settings inside.
Now to get rid of this extra information again,
you can just press this toggle and now only
the pinned panels and properties are shown in this interface
next to the shape tab to change the modifier settings
there is the material tab.
In the material panel you control over all the different settings
that make up the material of the brushstrokes
At the top you can see the material that is used by the brushstroke layer.
Multiple brushstroke layers can share the same material,
so make sure to keep an overview of that.
All the settings below are regarding the material that is selected here.
At the top you can select the color of the material. By default,
This is set to use the brushstroke color,
which is given either by you drawing them in or from the color panel in the shape tab.
But instead to make it easier,
you can also disable this check box and then choose the color directly in here
to make the brushstrokes look a little bit more natural
you can add some variation to the color for
each individual stroke to make it less uniform.
Then you can control other PBR parameters
for the opacity of the brushstrokes, metalness
roughness, etc.
You can use these to represent different materials with your brushstrokes.
Besides all of these fundamental material properties,
you have also the brush style and the effects tab.
Let's look at the brush style.
First up,
you get a preview of the texture that is used for the brushstrokes right now.
And you can select different textures. Right now,
there are no results found because we just enabled the
add-on when I press this button to refresh.
You can see that there is a list of pre installed texture sets.
Let's choose a different one.
You can see how the preview changes and also the look in the 3D viewport.
Here are some basic settings
to control how exactly the texture looks.
Besides these scans of hand painted brushstrokes, there's also a default texture.
This one is a procedurally generated brushstroke mask
and because of that you get a bunch more parameters, but at the same time,
it looks less realistic as well.
Let's go back to the one we had in the beginning.
This curve here gives you some basic control over the opacity
and how it is applied to the texture of the brushstroke.
By using a combination of different brushstroke layers with different textures,
you can create all sorts of styles
and communicate different structures in the material.
The effects also help with that.
On this layer, there's already the fade effect turned on
which makes everything look a bit more soft. If I turn that off,
you can see how the outsides of the brushstroke are a bit more harsh.
All these effects that can be toggled for a material can be
used for different kinds of looks and have their own settings.
A canvas, for example can be used to help communicate a fabric material.
They can also be stacked on top of each other.
This third tab lets you control additional settings over the brushstroke layer.
For example,
you can toggle on additional more advanced functionality like drawing
on a deforming surface like a character in a shot
or animating the brushstrokes over time.
I have briefly already shown it before,
but let me quickly show you the draw operation again.
The moss on these rocks, for example, here
is made from a draw layer when I click the edit brushstrokes button
that puts us into edit mode and selects the brushstrokes draw operator.
So here we can control a bunch of different settings like for example,
using the pressure of the stylus for the radius as
well as the color that we want to draw with.
Here, you can see the mass is made up of all these curves under the hood
and we can easily draw in another one right here.
And then these fuzzy brushstrokes pop up in the color that we chose
just like a fill layer.
The draw layer also has shape properties.
So here on top of the curve that we've drawn in,
there are a bunch of procedurally generated
duplicates of the stroke that are spread out
over the surface and have a noise applied to them to make it more fuzzy.
And that way we get this look of the fuzzy moss.
That makes it very easy to quickly sketch in where the moss should appear.
When clicking the edit button on a fill layer,
you get to draw in the flow like I've also shown you before.
But another way of setting the flow is doing it directly in the surface object itself
on this rock here, for example,
if I select the surface
and go into edit mode,
I can select these edges and then mark them to define the flow of the brushstrokes.
This add-on comes with a pie-menu on CTRL+ALT+F
that gives you the operators to mark parts of the
geometry directly so that the brushstrokes can use it.
For example, we can mark these edges as flow.
And now you can see that the brushstrokes are all following this exact direction.
One important thing to mention about the use of this add-on as a prerequisite
is that your meshes that you're applying the brushstrokes to
need to be UV unwrapped.
There really isn't much of a high requirement for these UVS
though they only need to exist and be somewhat reasonable.
In most of the cases, it will be enough to do an auto unwrap.
But this also mean means that you cannot simply just expect to be
able to use these brushstroke tools
on generated geometry with constructive modifiers.
For example,
the mesh coming out of a skin modifier or
a solidify modifier does not automatically have usable uvs.
So usually just apply these modifiers and do a simple automatic UV unwrap
before you get started with the brushstrokes.
The last thing I quickly want to go over are the add-ons user preferences.
Now, usually you probably won't have to adjust these
but I still want to mention them. By default,
all of the assets used by the brushstrokes add-on
are appended into your file and the textures are packed
so that you don't rely on the outside resources.
If you want to, you can instead link all of the data from the resource directory.
That resource directory is the add-on directory.
So if you're working on a production,
I would recommend you to choose another custom path
that you can relatively link to from your project file.
After selecting the path,
you need to actually copy all of the resources into the target directory.
You can use this operator to do so.
Make sure to get this set up right before you
start using the brushstrokes add-on for your specific project.
After changing the directory, you should also press this button
to reload all of the brush styles from the right resource.
In the future we're going to make it easier to make your own custom brush styles
and we want to also provide some more from our own end.
So here is where they are going to pop up.
All right, so that's a basic overview of the add-on.
Now, if you want to, you can just take this information and play around with it yourself.
I did my best trying to implement it as intuitively as possible,
but a general knowledge of how blender works is definitely recommendable.
I still recommend you to check out the rest of this video series where I'm going
to go over a wide range of details on how to use the brushstroke tools extension
to create this little scene.