Hey everyone! We are using our 2D skills to make 3D art! In part 1 we used the grease pencil as a basis
for 3D, and we learned how to paint in 3D just like we do in 2D. Here in part 2 we'll take the
grease pencil to the next level and we'll discover tools in Blender that us 2D artists can easily use!
We'll end off today with this scene... which I think is pretty cool. This series is brought to
you by Acer's ConceptD: a new line for creator PCs. I'm using the ConceptD 7 Ezel in this video and
you'll see some of my favorite highlights of this machine along the way. Alright so this is the value
sketch we left off with. I want to make a color key that I can then reference in 3D. Let's begin, though,
with a little color lesson! When we paint values, any value appearing alone is kind of meaningless.
This value for example just reads flat right now. A value gains meaning when it's seen
against another value. In other words, when it's given context. So the value that was once flat
has now been transformed into light, when seen against a darker value. So light versus shadow
is always the value context you're working within. The outer range of that context ... these guys here
that's something you decide. You could have a value range like this for light and shadow ... or you could
just as easily narrow it. These two values are at the lower end of the value scale but i still
have light and shadow. So individual values do not have concrete identities; they're given identities
through context. The halftone value on this sphere for example would be objectively wrong on this
sphere. That's because we've disregarded context. Now, in the world of color, you think the same way!
only with color the two extremes are not light versus dark, they are warm vs cool. A painting
whose colors work will often chart a path between those two extremes. The structure of
these paths are simple. We'll use these two colors as our warm and cool extremes for this example.
And here's the first path. We'll start at the warm extreme and simply go around the color wheel.
You could go the other way as well of course. But that's a legitimate way to move from warm to cool.
Though it's not exactly subtle. Okay so we'll put that first path over here. Now consider path
number two. We'll use the same colors but this time we'll shoot straight through the gray to arrive at
our cool. Our two paths achieve the same thing in theory ... but they look very different! Spoiler alert:
this is closer to how nature does it! It's just how colors tend to behave when one temperature
is mixed into its opposite temperature: the ensuing battle leaves both of them compromised and we're
left with relative degrees of grey. But nature doesn't just have two color charts like that.
nature will often throw in a little twist: it'll combine these two structures. The path with these
two colors would look something like this, resulting in a color chart that has more hues
to it, but also respects the 'collateral damage' of gray that occurs when moving from one temperature
to its opposite. So these three paths are very important to have in mind. Let's jump from theory
to practice now and do a quick little study. Using a photographic background here to emphasize how
these colors fit within a context. I'll try and hit my warm and cools right away. If not the absolute
extremes, at least get them in the ballpark. The sunlight gives me warmth in the light side
while the shadows typically receive cooler colors due to the absence of the sun's warmth.
I'm determining here where my extremes of warm and cool might be. I can always expand or contract
them as i work. In the cool shadows I now want to add a warmer reflected light so using my chart I
trend up toward the warms. The blue skylight coming down on the other hand needs a cooler temperature
so using my chart I trend downward toward the cools. Then it's just a matter of playing with
little temperature adjustments within those bigger decisions to arrive at something you think looks
good! Alright, with these charts, not every color needs to make it into your painting. For example
here these are the colors i'm using on this sphere. Of course, they need to be adjusted for value ... there we go.
People are used to seeing this kind of color movement: we see it in nature every day! So using
a few colors along the chart will prompt that recognition. So how do you know where to set your
warm and cool extremes? Are there any rules for that? Well... not really! This can be purely aesthetic.
Here's a photograph I took. A comparatively warmer sunlight and a cooler shadow. Classic outdoor stuff.
Now, this is what the camera is telling me...but for the sake of art, what if I want that sun to feel
warmer? Well, watch the color wheel - I could move the sun here, but now I'd have two equally saturated
colors for both light and shadow which may not be the best idea. So I'll move the shadow warmer as
well as I go ahead and paint this. This will give a different color 'key', which alters the feel of
the piece, but nature's relationships remain true. And just to sprinkle in a little more complexity -
watch the color wheel - I'm allowed to split this off and get a few varieties here - that's okay.
So, even though I've changed nature's colors from this to this, the result can still feel believable
and that's because i've maintained the same relationship, I've just shifted the context.
Okay let's go back to the original and this time we'll change the key to make everything cooler.
So the shadows will move, and then the lights will move accordingly. I'll start here by painting in
the new sunlight color... and notice how right now the sunlight looks too cold. I have to adjust
the shadows to be cooler to support this new warm/cool relationship. Now the sunlight color suddenly
looks warm again! So here's our three color keys. basically, they all work, it's just a matter of
which you prefer. And again, just like value, it's not about the individual color you're choosing,
it's about the context or relationships you're preserving. Okay back here let's say I wanted my
sphere to have a stronger local color... say, this red. In theory, my coolest temperature could still exist
here, driven by the blue sky environment. Also quick side note: notice how that path doesn't go as close
to gray. That's due to the position of those two colors relative to each other on the color wheel.
Anyway that saturated red provides a much different starting point on the color wheel
than we had before. It'll probably make the cooler shadow color stop somewhere around here. That red
ball still moves from warmer to cooler... just in a narrower space. Think of local color like a
tug-of-war, where a saturated local color can pull the shadow temperature closer toward it.
OK so, with all this in mind, here's how you can go about defining a palette for your scene. Take the first
two charts we looked at and determine on each of them what range you might want to experiment with.
I'll choose something like this on the color wheel. Then I'm limited to these colors here.
That's the gamut I'll work within. But we know that using this chart here, this movement around
the color wheel represents going from warm to cool... we also know using this chart that this movement
represents going from warm to cool as well. So remember in part one we left our scene like this?
Well, I designed those values with color in mind! And it's pretty simple: the lights are going to get
the most warmth and the shadows are going to get the most cools. So light colors roughly relegated
up here and shadow colors roughly relegated down there. A little overlap between families is fine.
in fact i'll talk about that as i go ahead now and develop this color key. Notice the first thing I'm
doing here is putting those colors on the canvas. I find it helps to visually define the range you'll
be working within. So switching back to values for a second... here I'm establishing my darkest values
right away. My value sketch from part 1 told me that these elements will be the darkest
values in the picture, and because I know that to be correct, I might as well put them in now.
It'll help me gauge everything else. I'll do the same type of block in now for the other values
in the painting. I made a selection to isolate the foreground from the background and just using a
soft brush, I'm brushing in colors from the palette - again favoring warms in the foreground and cools
in the background. Although, one tactic I'm using is: I'm keeping them a little grayer overall,
on both sides. That will allow me to branch out into saturation - again, on both sides, until I achieve a
balance I find pleasing. Speaking of evaluating colors and values, I can personally vouch for
the ConceptD as a professional device. As you can imagine, I'm pretty picky about values and colors.
And I find the Adobe RGB display perfectly good for my work! Alright so with the foreground
fairly developed there, I'll now switch to the background. Structurally, I've already determined
all my answers: I know what the values should be, for example, I know that these tombstones are dark,
but cannot be as dark as this value. That was a readability thing I established in Part 1.
And color-wise it's mostly in the cools as we discussed, but this is where that overlap
can happen. Earlier on I was talking about starting neutral and then branching out
into saturation. Well, you also have to consider going the opposite way and coming back in. See how
this foreground tombstone is overall warm ... but has this hint of coolness at the bottom? Compare that
to this background tombstone which appears cooler overall. But its color is actually warmer than
that color note in the foreground tombstone. I've reversed my color logic in this one area, creating
a bit of a warm cool overlap. But in moderation, that's a good thing. It'll help this painting
feel like a painting and less like a coloring book. It'll also help mimic the randomness of nature. the
key though is to keep track of when you're doing this stuff. you want to be very disciplined with
it. As I'm working here, I'm predominantly using my main color logic with cools in the background
and warms in the foreground. And as a last touch here I'll lay in that falling snow. This is just
done with a scatter brush. And that'll just about do it for the color key! With this information
let's dive back into painting in 3D! This was our aimless wandering in part, 1 which we are going to
redo referencing our new color key. Let's bring in that color key first go up to Edit-> Preferences
click on the add-ons tab and search for 'Images as planes.' Click this on. Now go to Add -> Image -> Images As Planes
select the color key painting, then over here switch it to shadeless and turn 'use alpha' off.
Now we have our color key which we can move into place and sample from as we paint. So I
want to fill in some colors that are more aligned with the color key. I'll switch into texture paint
mode I can sample off my color key with 's' and then instead of using the paint paintbrush i'll
just switch to the fill bucket tool. Now, one tip I received from one of the preeminent members of
the blender community: to switch between objects in paint mode, hover over the object and press 'alt + q'.
This works in other modes too like edit mode and sculpt mode. so that's what I'm doing here to block
in my colors: selecting objects, sampling from my color key, and just paint bucket filling them. The
other thing i like to do for efficiency: by default the 'TAB' key toggles between edit mode and object mode.
But if you go up to Edit -> Preferences under the 'keymap' tab, enable this 'tab for pie menu' option.
Now when you press 'tab' you get the entire modes menu, which is quite useful for our process. Alright
in texture paint mode you can import brushes! Go up to the texture mask menu click 'new' then click this
button here. Now in the side panel click 'open'. Now, behind the scenes I've prepared a few jpeg files
that look like this. I'll go ahead and open that file, then back up here in this menu make sure
this is set to 'view plane,' and I like to turn on 'random'. And now I am painting with that brush! I'll
rename that brush and then click this button to import another one, go through the same process
then rename this new one. Then click on this icon to access your brushes. I know it's a bit of a
non-intuitive way to import brushes. The blender developers will probably change this in a future
release. But hey - it works and I'm happy. I'll share some of the brushes I'm using here - check the video
description. Oh, to disable your custom brushes and just go back to the blender default brush, click
this 'x' button. So I'm just going around ALT + q-ing my way into different objects, painting things up,
following my color key. Quick reminder: that you can change your blending mode up here. Also 'f' is the
shortcut key to change your brush size. Alright, so you might have noticed I'm missing a bunch
of elements like the trees and the foreground gate. I'm going to paint those in 2D using the
grease pencil! Remember from part 1 that a grease pencil object is added where the 3D Cursor is.
To control that point precisely, I pulled out a new view, select the ground and tab into edit mode. In
edit mode select a few points in the foreground then push 'Shift + S' and say: 'cursor to selected'.
The 3D cursor pops to that point and now we can say Add -> Grease pencil -> Blank. Now I'll go ahead
and start painting that gate. And i love this process because it's effectively combining 2D
with 3D, but all within Blender! One thing here: make sure this icon is checked on. That allows you to
pick colors using this palette. To erase strokes just hold down 'control' while you're drawing.
All right I want to paint in that fluffy snow now, so I'll click into this green icon and make
a new layer here. I can rename it... then I'll pick a lighter blue color and start painting my snow.
But wait a second... that color's not what I picked! I have to disable this 'use lights' checkbox
which is by default 'on' for every layer. That's actually a pretty cool feature, having your grease
pencil strokes be able to react to light ...it's just that in our scene we're not using lights!
We want to paint every color ourselves. Now, I don't think you can sample with the grease
pencil, which is a bit unfortunate. But one cool thing: remember i can always tab into sculpt mode
and edit my painting this way! The grease pencil is just a fantastic tool. And you might have noticed
all these cool brushes i have in here. this was brought to my attention by a kind emailer Duane Baldish.
There's a link to this Blender Community page in the description and you can download the
brushes here. To load the brushes go to File -> Append, select the file you just downloaded, and say 'append'.
now go into the brush folder and shift select all of these then click 'append' again. And there you go!
Thanks again Duane for that tip! These are really cool brushes that expand the functionality of the
grease pencil. Right now though i'm not using the grease pencil; i'm back in 3D texture paint mode.
But I will switch back to the grease pencil for this tree. Now remember from part 1 that the
grease pencil draws things on a flat 2d plane? That was okay for our gate ... but I want this
tree to have more 3D to it. You know, branches shooting off in different directions in space.
To do that, I'll orbit my view as I draw the tree, applying strokes from different angles.
But for that to work you have to set this mode here to 'stroke.' That'll ensure that any new
stroke you make snaps to an existing stroke. So i can easily build my tree out from all angles.
Stroke mode also helps me paint the snow on top of the tree branches because I know that whenever i
paint it'll automatically snap itself to a branch no matter how it's oriented in 3D. And don't forget
to play with sculpt mode to add even more depth to your grease pencil paintings! Blender really does
a great job at catering 3D tools to us 2D artists! Some more workflow tips for you: I'm painting the
background here in a new window so i can keep tabs on it from my camera view on the left. Here's a
quick way to mask things: go into edit mode and I'm in face-select mode here. Select some faces. In this
case, the top plane of the tombstone. Then tabbing back into 'texture paint' mode, click this button up
here and now you're painting just those polygons. unclick the button to paint the whole object again.
Because these are background tombstones I really don't need to paint each single one. I'll take one
that i like, in 'object mode' push Shift+D which duplicates it... then just drag it into place, and
maybe delete one i haven't painted. This reduces your computer's workload too as these two objects
share one texture.Sso remember back in part 1 we modeled these snow clumps with metaballs?
i've changed my mind on that. I think I'd rather do this with the grease pencil. So I'm hiding
them in the outliner, then tab into 'edit mode' and select an edge or a face something at the front of
the object then push Shift+S and say 'Cursor to selected.' Then back in object mode add a grease
pencil blank so we're drawing right in that spot. Switch into draw mode, grab a brush, make sure 'use lights' is off,
then I can paint the snow in like this. I think this is better than the metaballs
because I get more varieties of edge this way. Just like my tree I can orbit to the side of the
object make sure i have 'stroke' mode selected and then paint the snow wrapping around the tombstone.
And just like we did with the tree: switching into 'sculpt mode' and sculpting this into place.
Alright our color key has tons of background trees ... And I really don't want to paint that by hand!
Go into Edit -> Preferences. In the 'Add-ons' tab, enable this 'sapling tree gen' add-on
then go up to Add -> Curve -> Sapling Tree Gen. Open up this little tab at the bottom, and the first thing
i like to do is increase the scale, and there's my tree! And you can play with all kinds of settings
here. Once I have the tree I like, right-click on it and say 'Convert to mesh.' Then I'll quickly
place it in the scene then set it up for texture painting, just like we did with everything else.
You know, emission shader... new image texture... don't forget to unwrap the uvs using smart uv project ...
if you're new to this series, we covered all this in detail in part 1. Anyway, now I have a real 3D
tree that i can start painting! These background trees don't need any detail and i want them to
mush together into a cluster of branches. So i've just got the big soft default brush and
I'm working these gradients. of course i could have done my foreground trees this way but I used the
grease pencil there because i want the foreground stuff to feel more hand-painted. Yet another way to
put art in your scene is paint something up in your 2D program. I'm here in photoshop, painting
this pine tree. Make sure it's on a transparent background and while I'm here i just want to
say that the ConceptD uses Wacom technology, and its stylus is right up there with my Pro Cintiq!
The device is also very customizable from a form factor perspective: I feel like no matter where
I go, I could be comfortable with this machine. So, back in Blender, go to Add -> Image -> Images as planes,
select your painting, make sure it's on shadeless, and use the alpha, and now we've got yet another
hand-painted element in the scene! So I'm using all the same tools, building this out. Here's
a cool little 2D atmospheric trick. In photoshop I'll paint up some fog, save out a transparent PNG,
import it as a plane in Blender, and simply place it where it needs to go, and just like that I've got
a sense of atmospherics in the scene! You can edit your texture paintings in your 2D program as well.
Pick an object that has a texture painting, then in the 'Materials' tab, click this button here.
Use the first option and Blender will save out your texture to a file. Now I can access that
file in photoshop. This texture is my focal point tombstone. And here I can manipulate it in all
kinds of ways! For example, laying in a photographic element. One technical thing you should know: when
you go to File -> Save, Blender saves your scene ... but NOT your textures. If I were to quit Blender now it
prompts me to save 13 modified images. These are the textures you've been painting, and you can
just press 'Save' here. Alright one last creative touch today: I want to put in those snowflakes!
With the 3D cursor near the main tombstone, I've added a grease pencil blank, and i'm just dotting
in the snowflakes. Now in 'edit mode' I can select individual snowflakes and just use the move tool
to distribute them in 3D space a little bit. I have this little cloud of snowflakes now. In 'object mode'
all of these snowflakes are considered one object, so I could simply duplicate it around the scene.
With each one I'll adjust the scale, the rotation... and look at this! For the first time, to me, the
environment feels alive! And we'll bring it to life further in Part 3 with some animation!
I hope you found this lesson helpful and inspiring. I recommend you try creating in Blender; it's
tons of fun! Subscribe to the channel for ongoing content and I'll see you next time with PART 3 :)