Skip UV unwrapping - Vertex Painting for Beginners

Download the free tutorial files here:
dragonboots.gumroad.com/l/xvudf
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0:00 UVs and Retopo suck!
1:14 Colour attribute node
2:08 Vertex Painting
4:25 Procedural materials
7:47 Baking textures
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Check out my Gumroad for a bunch of free Blender stuff:
dragonboots.gumroad.com
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#Blender #VertexPainting #Texturing

[@leslyskugga]

everything i need to know in 12 minutes, thank you.

[@chodosz]

You deserve more subscriptions. Somehow your tutorials are easier to follow, better paced and clearer than anyone's else I have seen so far.

[@JamieDunbar]

Thanks heaps PatrickCh 🥰

[@TomasHradckyComposer]

Definitely subscribing. I really appreciate the explanations on what Blender is doing under the hood. These are the details that help round out the whys of it all for me. Plus, I had no idea vertex painting could look so good. Many thanks.

[@JamieDunbar]

Yay! Welcome to the channel Tomas. The first 3D program I learned was Maya. What’s interesting about Maya is, under the hood everything is nodes (similar to geometry nodes, except it’s the whole program). Once you figure that out, it gives you the knowledge to do just about anything. Blender hides a lot of that kind of stuff. Which makes it easier to learn, but harder to understand what’s happening. Anyway, that was the really long way of me saying - yes that’s exactly what I try to teach 😁 I’m glad you picked up on it.

[@terryperehinec]

Great tutorial! Looking forward to practicing more vertex painting using this guide. A lot of good info here. Thank you for sharing!

[@JamieDunbar]

That's brilliant. Hopefully it helps :)

[@hereb4theend]

Such a professionally done tutorial. 😮 No errs or "you know" or "we are going to" or "I'm now going to" or frantic hand weavings. Just an exploration of a curiosity with method, strategy, and gotchas to look out for. This is superbly done. Thank you sooooo much for such a quality tutorial. I subscribed immediately! 😭

[@JamieDunbar]

Naw, thanks Ivan. You're far too kind 😍 Let me assure you, there's quite a bit of editing that goes into removing a lot of that stuff. Lmao, actually I posted one of my screw ups on the Facebook page a couple of days ago: fb.watch/ozJoCwkFoe/

[@soulovercaos]

very useful and doubles up as a texture baking tutorial 👍

[@JamieDunbar]

Thanks mate. I'd still like to come back and do a dedicated baking tutorial. Include things like normal and displacement maps too.

[@a3dadventure79]

really solid tutorial. i love vertex painting, it's like i'm a kid again! then to combine that with shaders and bake to a texture. it's very flexible as a workflow, especially for taking into game engines!

[@JamieDunbar]

Thank you. I'd be really curious to see how importing vertex painting into Unreal Engine would go. I haven't tried that yet.

[@jayrajkharvadi]

Great tutorial. Love this.

[@CosmicComputer]

Wow great tutorial, thank you!!!

[@JamieDunbar]

Yay! You're most welcome :D

[@ShoryYTP]

UV unwrapping is so easy and relaxing, idk why people are so against it

[@JamieDunbar]

Hahaha, there's always at least one 😉 My dirty little secret...I actually don't mind doing retopology. But don't tell anyone 🤫

[@ShoryYTP]

same, it's a bit boring at worst but once you get it it's easy enough@@JamieDunbar

[@Geraldbrick]

I think I speak for many when I say I'm just too lazy

[@Manofmans]

I'm just really impatient

[@godwhy7738]

Same with retopology I really don't see why people hate it so much

[@Sanzhar_00_]

Thank you very much !

[@JamieDunbar]

You're most welcome 😆

[@altran1125]

good video

[@Atomic-toons00]

I love uv paint❤

[@ChristianRLopez]

Thank you for the Tutorial and a quick ask. Vertex paint and ptex, is Vertex better and more advanced, or basically the same or are there any trade-offs? I understand that nobody uses ptex but is it because it is no good or not well supported? many thanks.

[@JamieDunbar]

Oh man, I remember when Ptex first came out. I was in my last year of University and we were all so excited it was going to kill off the need to make UV maps. Alas, the technology never really took off. I'm not entirely sure why. I suspect it's because having a texture for every single face on your model (and thus, tens of thousands of UV islands) made it impossible to take that texture map into another program like Photoshop and edit them. So that's how Ptex work. They're still kind of using UVs. It's just that every single face has it's own UV map and it's own texture. So in a way that's not dissimilar to how Vertex Painting works. Except Vertex Painting can only have one colour value per vertex, whereas Ptex can have an entire texture map per face. Which also means that Vertex Painting needs lots of vertices for more detail. Ptex can have a 16*16 map or a 16k*16k map per face.

[@snark567]

Beginning of the video: "What if I told you, you can skip the process?" Ending of video: "As you can see we can't quite skip the process yet"

[@hotsauce7124]

Hello, is there a way to implement a vertex polypaint feature into a a procedural shader with scratched edges and anisotropic streaks lines? Or, is there a way to create shader nodes that will allow the user to select Polys and color them...then plug that feature into into a procedural shader with scratched edges and anisotropic streaks lines?

[@marcoaureliofernandezreyes1413]

Good results! A little off-topic here, but, do you have a tutorial for make this Pokémon? Thanks.

[@JamieDunbar]

Thank you! Really sorry, this is one of the few Pokemon sculpts I didn't record 😬 I did record both Charmeleon and Wartortle if you're interested. Charmeleon: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oYqcY618d7yng6s Wartortle: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gKiYf2qfqrytm68

[@marcoaureliofernandezreyes1413]

Thanks for the reply 👍 I am interested. Will look the videos and get the inspiration and learning I need to start using Blender. Thank you so much 🙏

[@aegisgfx]

Why use the pointiness node instead of the AO node? Seems to me they do the same thing?

[@JamieDunbar]

Oh man, I wish I could share a screenshot on KZbin. They do some similar stuff, but they're not identical. The AO node is really good at picking up larger, broad details. While the Pointiness node is much better at picking up small, fine details. And you can totally combine them together (mix node set to multiply) to get the best of both.

[@Dolores-s-sentence]

I have a question! Can you make a Second Vertex Paint layer, like for example a Tattoo on skin and sit it on top of different paint without it blending and mixing? It would help so much!

[@JamieDunbar]

You certainly can! At 1:50 where I show the color attribute tab you can add multiple vertex paint layers. In the shader editor, make a second color attribute node and give it the same name as your new vertex paint layer. Then you can mix these two color attribute nodes in the same way you would any texture. So far example, one might be your base skin color. The second might be a black tattoo. Using a mix node, layer the tattoo over the skin using multiply.

[@darkalleywaystudio3975]

Vertex painiting has it's uses but Blender can not beat Substance Painter. Which requires good UV unwraps, so this technique would only be useful if you're staying in Blender itself. I would recommend users still learn how to UV unwrap over vertex painting any day. As it goes with most worflows.

[@JamieDunbar]

Omg, how good is Substance Painter? Every now and then I find a tool that instantly makes me a better artist. Sculpting tools were one. My motion capture suit was another. And Substance is a third 😍 Vertex painting is a really cool hack either for testing out models or for a very specific project. But yeah, it's definitely not replacing UVs any time soon.

[@darkalleywaystudio3975]

@@JamieDunbar I hate to say this but it made my work a lot better once I stopped texturing in Blender. I try to stay in Blender as much as possible but when it comes to texturing Substance painter is the industry standard for a reason. I would love to see Blender compete with Substance someday.

[@GodBurstPk]

Is there any way to remap color attributes? i have a voxel created in external software and when merging by distance to remove overlapping vertices the texture gets stretched.

[@JamieDunbar]

It doesn't matter if you're using Vertex Paint or textures, if you merge the vertices you'll have changed the vertex count (which will mess up the vertex paint) or you'll have changed the UVs (which will mess up your texture). Your best bet might be to have one model with the textures working. Duplicate it and merge vertices. Then bake the first model onto the second. It's basically the same process shown in the last part of the tutorial. Does that make sense?

[@GodBurstPk]

@@JamieDunbar I figured another solution out, you could just change the color attribute mapping from vertex to face corner. Thanks for the fast response anyway!

[@JamieDunbar]

@GodBurstPk Oh awesome. I'm not going to pretend I know why that worked, but I'm glad it did!

[@fecalis]

мой спаситель

[@JamieDunbar]

😇😇😂

[@OrdinaryPersonah]

Is it possible to connect blender and krita(painting software) for vertex painting

[@JamieDunbar]

I don’t think so. I’ve only recently started using Krita, but I don’t think it has 3D support. There does appear to be plugins that allow you to import 3D models, but it looks like that’s for painting UVs, not vertex painting.

[@PKM1010]

1:36 There is nothing in the selection box, cannot choose color :(

[@JamieDunbar]

Jump on over to the Color Attributes tab (it’s a couple of seconds later in the video) and create a new one. I’m pretty sure in older versions of Blender you had to manually type them into the node, it didn’t have a drop down like it does now.

[@remusveritas739]

Can i use this method for blocky video game assets (like a Deep Rock Galagtic look) or is this unfit for using in video games for some reason? I realy hit a hard wall with UV unwrapping in my learning progress and its ruining my motivation.

[@JamieDunbar]

If you're trying to skip UV unwrapping while making a video game - this method isn't going to work for you. For vertex painting to work you need a lot of vertices and video games prefer a lower number of polygons. It's possible to turn a high poly sculpt into a game asset using this method - but you'd still need to do retopology and UVs as part of that process :(

[@remusveritas739]

@@JamieDunbar thank you very much, so i make a high poly model, a low poly model, i uv map the high poly, paint and texture it and bake that into the low poly, right?

[@remusveritas739]

@@JamieDunbar or should i just make low poly models, uv map them and paint nice images in photoshop on the uv maps? (so leave out high poly models at all, would this be the best for beginners?)

[@JamieDunbar]

@@remusveritas739 Vertex Painting is kind of a mid tier level skill. It's certainly possible to incorporate it into your workflow. That said, if you haven't made a few game characters yet, I'd say stick with making low poly models, UV and paint them and get them into your game engine. Those are the beginner level skills you'd want to be good at before trying something more complicated like vertex painting.

[@remusveritas739]

@@JamieDunbar THANK YOU!!!!

[@kakgevaarlik7617]

hmm, why are my UVs not showing up @8.33?

[@anzaklaynimation]

It is impractical.

[@sobreaver]

It cannot be this easy. NO ! IT CANNOT ! 00 >.>

[@JamieDunbar]

🤯🤯🤯🤩🤩🤩

[@Arjjacks]

Kewl, you don't really come across vertex painting tutorials that often. And while it's true Blender will bin unused datablocks by default when you close it, you can go into the image menu and click 'Pack' to make Blender pack images/textures inside itself so that they're not lost when you close. Alternatively, I have File > External Data > Automatically Pack Resources on as a default setting, so Blender never bins anything ever on me.

[@JamieDunbar]

Solid advice. I should really turn that on by default and save it to my startup file. Actually I did that the other day and somehow still managed to lose a texture file! No idea how that happened - it's certainly isn't meant to. Might be a rare bug in 4.0 🤔

[@Arjjacks]

@@JamieDunbar Huh, weird. It's definitely not supposed to do that. Might be worth hitting a quick alt-S (save image) in 4.0 as well then, to be on the safe side.

[@BlackAndWhiteScribbles]

Its funny because im also doing a pokemon Im doing meetwo...

[@JamieDunbar]

Oohh, love Mewtwo (total Genwunner here 😜) Shoot me a link when he's done.

[@BlackAndWhiteScribbles]

@@JamieDunbar trust me I totally will

[@thiogarces]

Unfortunately in terms of production this is not correct in terms of concept yes it is but it is a pain in the butt to in case you just want to use this topology in others departments this will be a horrible nightmare skinning proper high-res texturing for micro details and by default for animation, rigging, lighting and rendering and compositing departments this will affect them because artifacts and weird flicks will appear in the final and different results.

[@JamieDunbar]

You umm....you didn't watch the whole video, did you mate?