Creating a 'Scratches' Brush in PS
greentooth
Its a staple of texturing. When metal is involved, you add scratches. I know alot of you guys have bitching scratch bushes that you use to speed up the process.
But for the life of me, I can't make a preset scratch brush that works. I don't know, something is missing. So please, share with me your scratch techniques.
And while we're at it, how do you get a brush to rotate along with the direction of your penstroke?
Thanks!
But for the life of me, I can't make a preset scratch brush that works. I don't know, something is missing. So please, share with me your scratch techniques.
And while we're at it, how do you get a brush to rotate along with the direction of your penstroke?
Thanks!
Replies
New layer, play with the fill to get the effect desired, bevel and emboss down, 0 or 1 px width, blend mode to suit.
Draw strokes with a single pixel hard brush with a grey color (not pencil) = instant scratches.
Also scratches often don't need the bevel and emboss,but a single pixel brush does nicely for creating the scratch. The idea is to figure out how deep and or how wide the scratch you want is. Does it penetrate the exterior material fully? What is underneath that material? Does it have multiple coats of paint? Was the scratch made by a blade, a claw, rubbing against concrete, or what? just repeated impact on exposed surfaces?
The shape of what made the scratch also contributes to how it should look in the end.
Like say you have a piece of military hardware. Its steel with a layer of primer followed by at least one coat of drab paint. If it gets scratched by a rock thrown up from a vehicle passing by or rolling in front of it or whatnot, there could be a little metal showing at the main point of impact with some primer showing around the the exposed metal and the overcoat around the impact area would have a slight ragged edge.
If you have a small scratch with low texel density you can imply all this by a the above scratch technique
rotating brush.
shape dynamics options in brush palette. set angle to "direction"
What I mean is, Could anyone share their settings, or brushes, for a good painting brush that leaves a scratch like effect. something more textured than the standard photoshop deal, that can be scaled up and down for high res work.
I think where I'm going wrong is the initial brush shape, theres nothign in my library that works, and googling turns up deviantart stamp brushes
Post a picture of what kind of scratch effect you're trying to achieve, and what results you're getting.
scatering?! :poly121:
When I get to work tomorrow, I can upload a few of the ones I use!
I actually use the lasso tool to add scratches most of the time. But it depends on the type of scratches.
thats just waht i do, after a while you get pretty fast at it, and it offers way more control.
thats exactly what i do :P
Play with the scatter, angle, and size jitters. Sometimes duel brush it with a softer fuzzy cloudy brush.
One brush probably won't do all the scratches you'll never need, so you'll probably have to create glass, painted metal, bare metal bla bla bla.
Normally I scare up some ref, and try to recreate the effect just by playing with all the settings. I think its easier and after to just toss a brush together (once you get used to the settings) when you need it than to scourer the web, a whole lot of lame stamp brushes out there...
Brush
How 2 use and speedy examples:
I hope that helps!
Quick meh scratch brush:
turn on size to be controled by pen
scatter set to both axis and set to 104%
set flow to 25%
set spacing to 25%
this brush will sort of not work well if you don't have size to be controlled by the pen and if it's too big.
Absoloutly perfect! thankyou!
For the record, I've been using tiny sharp brushes for years, but Ive recently been working on textures at 2048x2048 and it doesn't quite cut it. Then I realised I'd never really made many painting brushes before!
also fearian, I know you're asking for brushes, and of course you can have more control with them, but sometimes, although rarely I do use scratches stamps.
You can find some in there: http://rapidshare.com/files/246228670/Eat3d_Riki_Brushes_2008.rar.html
(It's from the Eat3D texturing tutorial DVD, I hope I'm not stepping the line with copyrights or something for sharing these)
RONG.
Check your shape dynamics, and set rotation to use either 'direction' or 'initial direction' (the latter is especially helpful when your brush doesn't lend itself to constant rotation, but you want it to respect the direction of your brushstrokes)
I find that using CrazyBump to get a starting mask for the scratches is a real timesaver too.
I use this kinda stuff:
MoP am I right?
Lately I've been doing a photoshop find edges->invert on my normal map to get quick start on scratches - I'll set this up as a mask on my bare metal layer, then put that in a group and add a new layer, add a mask to that, and start painting with a wide brush in the areas where I want scratches. POOF, instant scratches on edges. Then I'll paint over them with a scratch brush.
j/k I get ya Perna, was just being obtuse.
Eat 3D cant claim ownership for all these brushes but its important not to redistribute content from the DVDs for legal reasons. If you want I can release some brushes under GPL from a personal collection but the actual content from the purchased dvds need to be respected as a product. This is to protect eat3d and the customers who paid good money to get the content. I hope that makes since, we are just trying to do what we can, you have no idea how many piracy links we fight everyday, most from rapidshare.
Thanks for reminding me about find edges! I saw it in Sampson's cannon tutorial and promptly forgot it!
The download limit for the link has been reached, can you/somebody re-upload to another host please?
-copy AO into mask and push levels until occluded areas are invisible
then use as mask.
also use this as a cheap and quick way of highlighting convex edges using this method
-find edges on normal map
-invert
-push black to mid grey in levels
-make layer "overlay"
-copy AO into mask and push levels until occluded areas are invisible
set this up as an action and bingooooo
Can you explain this visually? I'm having a hard time following.
i'll write a mini tutorial, ive meant to for ages
Thanks. Looking forward to it
I understood everything you said Shepeiro, except this part: "push levels until occluded areas are invisible"
It's probably because I'm dense and I'm not sure if "occluded" is the black areas or white areas of an ao map. I thought it was the black areas, but when I make the black areas almost invisible the mask doesn't really have much of an effect.
Anyways thanks for sharing, and I have been wondering how people handle scratches for a long time now. This is a really awesome thread!
I especially like the highlight trick you mentioned second. I definitely never considered that one.
I bought all Eat3D env art DVD's so far!
Good thread we got going on here, continue contributing guys!
Really like SHEPEIRO's technique. Cant wait to try it. Hoping for that mini-tut as well.:)
vassgo- not sure it would probably work or give you something ok with a diffuse find edges using a lighting layer as a mask.
Here is the process:
Render a normal map and an AO map.
Load them both into photoshop, start working on your texture, etc, etc.
Take a copy of the normal map, run "find edges" on it. This will give you black lines on a white background.
Invert this. Now you have white lines where your scratches will be.
Make a new layer, fill it with a galvanized metal texture.
Add a layer mask, and paste your find-edged normal map into this to use as a mask. You should now have galvanized edges.
Put this layer in a group.
Add a layer mask to the group.
Copy your AO map into the group layer mask.
Adjust levels/curves on AO map mask as needed. Paint on the galvanized metal mask as needed to add more wear.
Obviously there is a lot of room in here for experimentation but thats the whole process, step by step. Is there something still unclear?
my workflow is slightly different from ghostscapes, but is pretty damn similar
i find i do very little actual painting these days, using a diffuse colour, normal, and AO bake to do pretty much everything, add some photosourceing for texture and youre pretty much there
I love it. Nice techniques I'm hearing. Ill try that method also.
this is something that a workshop would be usefull for
Crazybump is a great way to start off a metal spec map too. Only go pretty dark and use crazybump to work the edge detail a little lighter gray.
The only problem with Crazybump is that it tends to over do it on UV shell seams but in most cases that's easily masked out. Or avoidable if you where smart with your seams in the first place.
I understand one can take an image and create scratches from an image, with the aid of masks etc for high resolutions but having your own set of brushes, that can be reused, rather then a collection of images is more convenient and can be used many times.
Can the crazy bump technique be used in nDo, or is the workflow different in nDo ? As well how was the original image created in crazy bump, there was no mention of this ?