Important Painted Shader Tip

[dandelO]

I've had a little while to play with this over the last few days and for best use of the paint shader and you probably have all realised this already but, anyway...:

Open the painted shader preview that you will be painting on, let it render to the 'finished rendering' stage then pause it there. That way you won't have to wait on the refreshing preview after every brush-stroke and the brush will draw correctly instead of big triangles, 'macro-triangles'?

If you're painting in the 3D preview, use the 'terrain' tab preview. It renders quickest.(so does the camera tab but I'm not often in that view). You could also disable the light/atmo/shader effects in the preview of any tab to get the same effect.

Just remember to pause the window to start drawing, you'll find it much easier.

Now, when can we load brushes in? ... I don't ask for much, eh?

[mhaze]

Thanks for the info - it's a great addition to TG2

[sjefen]

I always did pause my preview render so this is a little natural for me, but thanks for the info anyway.

If you're painting in the 3D preview, use the 'terrain' tab preview. It renders quickest.(so does the camera tab but I'm not often in that view). You could also disable the light/atmo/shader effects in the preview of any tab to get the same effect.

But what if you'r painting a mask for the clouds

I have a little question. If I have some clouds in my scene and want to paint away some parts of it, how do I do that? Where do I connect the painted shader? I cant get it to work.

- Terje

[Matt]

Painting clouds is a bit more tricky because they exist in 3D space and the Painted Shader needs a surface to paint onto so that it knows where in 3D space your brush is. One way of doing this is to paint in a view from above the clouds and paint onto the ground, then as long as the projection is set to Plan Y (the default) your brush strokes will project up through the clouds. But you can't really do that if you want to paint within the view that your final clouds will be renderer from.

There could be some other ways to do this, e.g. placing a plane in your scene at the same height as the clouds (just to give the view something to paint onto when you're in paint mode), but I haven't tried that yet.

Matt

[sjefen]

Thanks Matt.

- Terje

[Matt]

A Painted Shader could be connected directly after your cloud fractal, then if you use black paint it will remove clouds. Be aware that you might be removing negative values as well as positive, so you wouldn't be able to use a coverage adjust that is greater than 0 in the cloud shader. Using coverage adjust in the cloud fractal would be the best option in that situation.

[bigben]

A Painted Shader could be connected directly after your cloud fractal, then if you use black paint it will remove clouds. Be aware that you might be removing negative values as well as positive, so you wouldn't be able to use a coverage adjust that is greater than 0 in the cloud shader. Using coverage adjust in the cloud fractal would be the best option in that situation.

Or you could use a colour adjust node after the painted shader and drop the black level below 0.  These two shaders are a masked man's best friends