Blender 3D: Create Your Own Sculpting Brushes!

[@bradmyers1431]

This video is excellent, thank you! There is one pretty major thing that everyone seems to be missing with custom sculpting brushes and I can't for the life of me figure this out. Say for example you want two variations of the same brush. A move brush, and a move topological brush. Its easy to duplicate the move brush as you show change the name, the icon and set masking to topological. Great. But you can't seem to set a hotkey for the new brush. You can only set a global hotkey for the "move brush" but not the subsets you create. Furthermore, you can't add the new brush to you ui either. I really hope there is a way to do this in blender because its a big deal being able to quickly navigate to custom brushes. Clicking on the brush then the box in the ui to select your custom brush is way way too time consuming if your a professional artist using custom brushes all the time. I appreciate any insights on this.

[@PhialoDesign]

Hi there bradmyers, there is kind of a solution for this. You can enable the add-on "Interface: Dynamic Brush Menus" (included in Blender). Then you can access all brushes with spacebar in sculpt mode, even your custom ones. If you label your custom brushes with numbers in front they will be shown at the beginning, as the brushes are alphabetically sorted. Hope this helps.

[@HanSolocambo]

Haven't seen anyone make an alpha for a brush with Photoshop in a while ;) Usually one does that by sculpting a plane and baking a height map. You get way more control over the shape of your alpha by sculpting it.

[@PhialoDesign]

Absolutely, you are totally right! I have an example of a very complex model created with a single brushstroke here: kzbin.infogPITO-8GXJY ...the whole wreath was created with a height map. Used around 20 mil vertices at max to get to that level of detail. I will probably explore that technique in new tutorials in the future!

[@titanmoruma5834]

Awesome tutorial!

[@3DWiz]

This video is massivly underrated! Thank you so much! Just used your video to do my own elephant-skin texture that wouldve cost me +20$ otherwise; Thank you so much!

[@PhialoDesign]

Thanks so much for sharing your experience! Very glad it helped.

[@LapinasFox]

Nice work! Any chance you have a tutorial on how you made the initial characters?

[@PhialoDesign]

I am working on a complete course for sculpting, there I will go in-depth into many techniques for creating something like this.

[@rubberdog]

Awesome video and a great help, thanks for the share 10/10

[@PhialoDesign]

You're welcome, thanks for commenting, 10/10 :)

[@josefl87]

Exactly what I was looking for :)

[@PhialoDesign]

Glad you like it!

[@iremdemir4490]

Thanks for this video :)))

[@PhialoDesign]

You're welcome 😊

[@hasger1941]

wonder is it possible to do the same with a portrait photo?

[@PhialoDesign]

Yes, it just needs a lot more vertices! Otherwise it will just be pixelated and not recognizable.

[@jcrc1717]

Blender needs so manual setup for small things to work the way they are supposed to.

[@PhialoDesign]

What do you mean exactly?

[@freezybean3350]

​@PhialoDesign I think they mean there's just a lot of steps to make something (like your own custom brush) to work in Blender. Steps that don't feel intuitive/don't make sense to someone who isn't familiar with this kind of program/process. I could be wrong though 😅

[@PhialoDesign]

The cool thing is that Blender is so customizable. Even if you sometimes need a few steps to get where you want. In principle anything is possible with Blender.

[@ivanm.612]

Better use tiff instead of png 😊

[@PhialoDesign]

Thanks! What are the advantages to use tiff?

[@HanSolocambo]

@@PhialoDesign For a bland and white alpha brush to use in ZBrush, Blender, etc. : none ;) The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.