Now, I’d like to have an actual texture of a stitch instead of just a round dot. I thought, easy enough - I just set a texture to the brush. Except, the mapping doesn’t work how I thought it would. The stitch texture is somehow mapped all over the place in space and just shows up wherever I paint.
Actually that’s what I do. The picture I posted is probably misleading. The texture is just one stitch. I painted all over the place to show how it is currently mapped ( for some reason) and that the stitched don’t show up on top of the cursor.
Using stencil is possible, but rather cumbersome, especially for longer lines of stitches.
Then you can draw using a texture with a line of stitches
Or if you have loads of stitches then make a model of a stitch and place it with an array on a curve that follows your model then bake the texture instead of painting it. If you’re not familiar with baking, it’s like rendering the model skin on a texture instead of painting it yourself. Sounds like lots of work, but you will get the best results and it’s actually easier than manual painting.
You can also do it with an external program like Photoshop, just paint the stitches over the model skin like this:
Instead of using Tiled in your texture setting set it as Stencil … then you can paint it wherever and at any size/direction, etc…
I made my stitches somewhat like shown in the video but with greater detail…and as an Alpha Brush…
The pain with Stencil is that you have to paint one stitch, re-align, paint another, etc. If there’s is several dozens to few hundred of them, it is a lot of work and hard to keep consistency in size& direction.
Same with baking. I could model, or sculpt them, then bake to normal map. Or even paint them in photoshop over UV un-wrapped mesh. Problem is, all these techniques add a lot of unnecessary steps.
It would be many times easier if it were possible to paint the shape directly on the model. Un-textured brush does that. Heck, even sculpting brush can do exactly that with texture.
It seems like quite basic functionality. It baffles me that it would not be possible.
Setting brush texture mapping to “view plane” along with orthographic projection would be the closest to sculpt mode, but yeah, the texture painting brush is lacking the ability to follow the surface normal like in sculpt mode…
You can also check “Rake”, then increase “Spacing” in stroke, then drag a line of stitches.
Oh, just remembered another method, if you have a nice unwrap then using rake and spacing you can draw directly on the texture, just change from view to paint in the UV window:
Indeed! Changing the mapping plane to “view plane” and checking the rake option did the trick exactly. Those were the options I was missing. It would be nice if the brush would follow the surface normals, but I can deal with that. I believe that with this settings the desired result can be achieved with relative ease. Thanky you very much for the advices!
