Sculpting - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 233

tool, for that matter), start with a low brush strength, around 0.1. You can always use multiple strokes of
the brush to build up an effect, and it usually looks more organic to do so instead of hitting everything
with a single pass of a high-strength brush.
That's how you make wrinkles, and scars too for that matter.
Warning
When detail sculpting, avoid the Grab brush. We're going to be baking our high-resolution sculpted
details into a normal map, which describes the difference between Normals of the high-resolution
surface and the low-resolution one. If you actually move the base geometry around, the results
from the normal map will be less than ideal. Try to have your basic structure “locked” by the time
you get to detail sculpting.
Let's add some minor blemishes and bumps. For this procedure, disable X Symmetry. Bumps are much
easier than wrinkles. Choose the Inflate brush and set the brush size to match the size of the bump you
want to create. Take a look in the tool shelf at the Curve panel. We haven't messed with it before, but
it's useful to take a look now. Figure 8.12 shows the panel. Unlike RGB curves that affect color, the
curve in this graph defines brush falloff. Figure 8.13 shows the three preset brush curves, and what they
actually translate to as a painting brush. The effect is most obvious during sculpting when using the Draw
tool, but it affects the way that all tools lay down their influence.
When creating little bumps on skin, it's probably best to ignore the presets and create your very own
curve. The Curve tool itself is identical to ones elsewhere in Blender (see Section 12.3 on compositing in
Chapter 12). Click and drag anywhere on the curve line to add a control point. Dragging control points
allows you to alter the shape of the curve. To remove a control point, LMB click to select it (it turns
white) and click the “X” above the curve workspace. To create a curve for skin bumps, choose Sharp
by clicking on the word “Preset” below the workspace. Grab the central control point of the curve and
drag it up and to the right, until it looks like Figure 8.14 . If you closely observe the little bumps on your
own skin, you'll notice that most of them are plateaulike, or mostly flat on top. The curve that we've
created reflects that.
Before adding bumps, check to be sure that the Space option in the Stroke panel is disabled, and that
you've disabled any symmetry settings in the Options panel. While you might be able to get away with
fine wrinkles being symmetrical, any kind of little skin bumps will look bad if they are mirrored from side
to side. The Space option causes your brush to “dab” as you paint, with each dab a certain distance apart.
When enabled and set to a low value, it is pretty indistinguishable from just turning it off, but when set
to higher values, it allows you to easily “draw” evenly spaced instances of your brush. Figure 8.15 shows
a surface that has received skin bumps at regular intervals by using the Space option. The reason we turn
it off now though is because we want to just be able to LMB click on the skin and have a bump appear.
You cannot do this when Space is enabled.
Don't go overboard with the bumping. Remember that the sample character is a kid. The older we
get and the longer our skin is subject to the environment the worse it becomes. As for varying the size
of the bumps, there are two methods. You can simply use the F key to change the size of the brush, or