Hey, is this still open? I wanted to suggest a pair of blending brushes for vertex painting. They don’t add any color of their own, just blend existing ones.
Blend Hard
Sort of a palette knife brush. Add some density or an alpha, and it’s very fun.
I hope the videos work, I can’t upload them directly here.
Settings (starting from default paint brush):
Strength 1.0, Pressure (might be too high for default, I just have a soft touch) Hardness 0.95 (mot a full 1.0 because then it’s just pixelated) Flow 0.5 Pressure Wet Mix 1.0 (this keeps the brush from using it’s own colors) Wet Persistance 0 Wet Paint Radius 0.5 Tip Roundness 0.5 (too square and the corners show when turning the brush) Spacing 5%
Blend Soft
Basically a super smooth brush.
Settings:
Strength 1.0, Pressure Hardness 0, No Pressure Flow 1.0, Pressure Wet Mix 1.0, No Pressure Wet Persistance 0.5, Inverted Pressure (I’m not fully sure what this does, but felt the best after fiddling around) Wet Paint Radius 0.5 Tip Roundness 1 Spacing 10% (doesn’t need more, and gives good performance with a big brush size)
Ugh, I can’t upload a .blend file with the brushes…
Yep the thread is still open. I’m currently in the process of packaging some more Essential painting and cloth brushes for the beta of 4.3. It’s the least that should be added.
I already have a brush included like the Blend Hard you proposed. I called it Wet Average since it behaves a lot like Average brushes in other painting modes. But I think your name is easier to understand.
I could make it a Blend Square, Blend Hard (Circle) and Blend Soft to make the set complete?
I can’t find “Wet Average” in the essentials_brushes.blend file you linked. Compared to my “Blend Hard”, is the main difference in shape?
I’d name them: Blend Square, Blend Circle, Blend Soft. The brackets make the name too long, and also make it seem like there’s a another Blend Hard brush like Blend Hard (Square) or (Triangle).
I also forgot another brush I wanted to suggest: Paint Pinch. It’s the smear tool with deformation set to Pinch and pressure enabled for strength.
I’ve never seen a color pinching functionality like this where it pinches along the stroke. It’s almost like manual sharpening. I often use it to sharpen the borders of the lips when I’ve blurred them too much.
More brushes will be added once the features improve. A lot of suggested brushes and changes made it in, even if the naming of the brushes ended up a bit different.
Thumbnails need more iteration. Some are in a rough state. Over the course of the Beta that can improve further.
Thanks everyone for the feedback and contribution!
To me, Sharpen implies a different effect, that of a Sharpen filter. Pinch is a different category of effects entirely, and I think we should ideally have both.
Plateau and trim, very good additions for hard sculpting.
I wish something could be done to make ClayThumb more useful, the idea is not bad, but it is very destructive.
I’ll post here the clay strips variant I suggested in the other thread. I use it as the main brush to build volumes and shapes. Compared to brushes such as draw or clay it feels more organic and easier to control.
Here are the settings:
Normal Radius: 1
Hardness: 1 with Use Pressure on (Note: I have tablet softness set to -0.5, for the default value of 0 a hardness of 0.7-0.8 might be better. I also like Pressure off with hardness at around 0.5 - 0.6. In general, I adjust hardness during sculpting depending on the situation. )
Plane Offset: -0.1 (This is crucial and I would actually also suggest this value even for the standard clay strips, maybe not -0.1 but around -0.05. It helps blending the shapes in a more natural way.)
Tip Roundness: 1
Stroke Spacing: 3% with Adjust strength for spacing off
Input Samples: 8
Falloff: I use a custom curve as unfortunately none of the default options give the desired feel. The points of the curve, from left to right, have coordinates: (0, 1), (0.35, 0.88), (0.57, 0.69), (0.76, 0.18), (1, 0)
Note: hardness was bugged in builds from around 26 to 29 sep, so avoid those or test on 4.2
Referring to my previous post, instead of relying on pen pressure for hardness, another alternative is to separate the brush into two:
One to build shapes and volumes, with: hardness 0.5 pressure off, normal radius 1.2, plane offset -0.05, everything else stays the same as my previous post. Default strength could be at around 0.65.
Another one for soft refinement, with: hardness 0, normal radius 1, planeoffset -0.15. Default srtrength around 0.45.
@Nicola_Dessi
A softer version of the Clay Strips brush would probably be good to include for less rough results. But ideally that should be the purpose of the Clay brush. It currently suffers from inconsistent smoothing strength, since the effect of smoothing depends on the resolution.
I think the modifier clay strips brush you showed initially is a valid customization. But I don’t think it’s worth it to add it as another Essentials brush. I think most users will customize the Clay brushes to feel more like they want.
I don’t really understand the purpose of the negative place offset. It just overall reduces the effect of the brush since it will add/subtract to a lower sculpt plane than where the cursor is.
Maybe you can explain more?
@JulienKaspar In the code there’s a (quite random, it should be lowered in my opinion) 0.18 value added to the offset, so for cursor level “Plane Offset” would have to be at -0.18. A lower plane tends to have a better blending effect and doesn’t build as much volume. The point is exactly to solve the problem you mentioned about the current Clay brush, here’s a comparison with my version:
On the left I’m using the Clay brush. The problems in my opinion are:
Smoothing Resolution problem you mentioned
Smoothing badly impacts performance
Even if smoothing worked perfectly, the result wouldn’t have an organic look
In general, relying on smoothing for having a soft clay brush seems a flawed idea
Too much volume is being added
On the right I’m using my Clay Strips version, with plane offset at -0.12 and other values same as in my previous post, the mechanics of Clay Strips just seem to be more ideal.
Maybe a too extreme idea but I would go as far as getting rid of the Clay brush and renaming Clay Strips to Clay. Then in the Essentials put 2 or 3 versions of it.
Regarding the “volume” version of Clay Strips, I would add it to the Essentials because, especially for new users, it’s not obvious at all that you can use Clay Strips to get these kind of brushes. This is because the artistic effect of Plane offset is quite mysterious and the combination of hardness + tip roundness is unintuitive.
I had a bunch of ‘Knife’, ‘Orb’ and different profile brushes in progress as well
They should definitely be included at some point but the big roadblock for now is the bad textured stroke raking and dependency on textures in general.
I’ll test out the brush and probably dust off the prototypes I had. But I think it needs more developer help to get these brushes off the ground as official Essentials assets that ship with Blender.
Hi blender community- I have few ideas for brushes.
brush that go beyond crease brush to carve overhangs this will lead to imitate joining two separate objects together and this will be better to render with great shadows , alsp this could be great to add in clay strips … this will look like real clay adding layers by layers by hand - profile will look like droplet hanging from siling for crease but for clay strip probably half of it on one side and mirror on another side.
snake hook brush with setings that allow drag mesh with no ending that needs to be dyntopo turn on also constant falloff turn on and propably some coding to not drag back side of created mesh - this will be great brush for creating trees from one sphere object .
3 brush that use alphas that bend that alpha on turn - great use for sculpting snake like paterns like stitches. For now we dont have that posibility
so alpha should be on subdivided plane and that will bend that alpha and use it as reference for sculpting good result of bending strokes with use of alpha brushes. example of bad behavior:
I personally like the current 4.2 ‘Clay Strips’. I feel it reacts very similar to what I’m used to in other software. I tried Outgang’s settings and they don’t really vibe with me. Obviously this is personal taste.
The ‘Clay Strips’ brush in this version. In version 4.3, the radius is set to default with size pressure turned off and a strength of 1.00. With this maximum strength, the displacement created is much less intense than I experienced in the previous version at a strength of 0.600. When I turn on the size pressure, the displacement becomes exceptionally subtle.
I hope I’m explaining this clearly, but the Clay Strips brush feels quite different in this version compared to earlier ones.
In the previous version, the Clay Strips brush’s radius was set to ‘size pressure’ toggled on with a strength of 0.600, which allowed the brush to work and ‘feel’ much better for quickly creating volume, as I would expect.
Those are just my two cents.
On another note, I think if the curser would change colour when you pressed shift to smooth it would be very helpful as a visual identifier that the smooth brush is active.
Regardless, amazing works as always, really excited for this next version!
I’ve been experimenting more with Blender 4.3’s ‘Clay Strips’ brush using the new default settings after switching back to the older ones. I take back what I said before; the new settings are an improvement and feel much smoother. I realized I just needed more time to adjust to the new brush behaviour.
This is a quick sketch I’ve been working on to try out the new features.
Thanks for the feedback!
I dug through the settings and it’s because in the Stroke panel the option ‘Adjust Strength for Spacing’ is enabled.
If you want to increase the Strength to get more range out of the pressure sensitivity you could disable this option and lower the strength back to ~0.5. But the full strength will then be way too extreme.
I hope this can be tweaked a bit more in the next release.
If there are issues with brushes that cause them to behave different than expected, or different from previous releases, we can/should fix that for the 4.3 release still.
