Texture Painting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 153

11
tex ture PAinting

In the previous chapter, we used Blender to gener-
ate textures automatically; in this chapter, we'll
shift our focus to creating textures by hand. Using a
mix of hand painting, working with photo textures,
and utilizing the textures we created in Chapter 10,
we'll bring color and texture to the objects in our
scenes. We'll also cover creating such images as
specular, hardness, and alpha maps, which we'll use
in Chapter 12 to influence other aspects of the mate-
rials we make, such as their shininess, smoothness,
and transparency. We'll look at creating both tile-
able textures that can be used on multiple objects
and unique textures that are UV mapped to specific
objects using a mix of both Blender and GIMP.
Let's begin with a look at the tools available.

our models. The brushes work across both the UV
Image editor and Texture Paint mode, making tex-
turing with Blender straightforward and consistent.
Once you select a mesh that has been unwrapped
and assigned an image in the UV Image editor, you
can switch to Texture Paint mode in the 3D Viewport.
(Use the mode drop-down menu in the header, as
shown in Figure 11-1.) By default, you'll see the tex-
ture on your mesh and be able to paint on it using
Blender's texture brushes.
Blender offers several brush types that you can
use to paint textures on your model:

Draw, Brush, and Texdraw These all offer the
same basic functionality, allowing you to paint
directly on your mesh with the color specified by
the color picker.

Texturing in Blender
In Blender, we can paint in 2D, using the UV Image
editor, and we can paint directly on objects in 3D,
using Texture Paint mode in the 3D Viewport. This
gives us a great degree of flexibility in how we paint

Clone This brush allows you to clone texture infor-
mation from one part of your model to another
or from one UV coordinate set to another. With
the Clone option turned off in the Project Paint
settings (see “Project Paint” on page 154), the
brush will take the texture information lying