About the course

This course deals with the full hard surface sculpting workflow in Blender, starting with drawing thumbnails all the way to a finished 3D sculpt. Along the way, we'll learn basic and advanced sculpting tools and brushes. Then we also dive deep into making awesome assets, like alpha textures, tiling displacement maps and hard surface VDM brushes.

Included in this course

  • In total 6 hours of video tutorials, narrated in english with captions

  • 2 hours 23 minutes of narrated, edited sculpting videos.

  • 100+ Alpha texture brushes (with preview thumbnails) to append into your project

  • Tiling Displacement maps

  • Hard surface VDM brush (more to be added in future updates)

  • Thumbnail sketches and final design sketch

  • All videos are downloadable for optional offline viewing

  • Procedural pipe models

  • Node groups for baking alphas and tiling displacement maps

  • Mech bust to experiment with

  • The unedited sculpting process is also available, should you want it.

  • Captions in Korean, Japanese and more languages coming!

  •  Free updates

Course content

On the course page on Teachable you can see the curriculum, including some public previews, like the first Sculpting video. Note, that the time displayed next to the Sculpting videos there is incorrect - it displays the length of the unedited videos, but most of the edited sculpting videos are around 5 to 10 minutes long. Check the Teachable page here.

Alpha textures

Alpha textures are height maps that quickly add intricate details to your model in Sculpt Mode. In this course, we dive into the theory of what makes a nice Alpha texture, how best to model them and then bake them. The course comes with 100+ Alpha textures, so you don't need to buy anything extra.

Learn how to:

Model alphas using various techniques, such as booleans and non-destructive modifier-based workflows. This will help you quickly generate a lot of variations.

We also dive into the theory of what makes a good alpha, and how to bake them perfectly.

Using nodes, we set up a baking system that adds nice bevels to the edges, so we can keep the modeling of these parts nice and simple and still have a great result.

Tiling Displacement Maps

Let's take advantage of the fact that we're sculpting in Blender, which means that we can use tools not normally found in sculpting apps. One of these tools is the tiling displacement map. This quickly adds displacement that you can play and experiment with, in order to rapidly get many ideas for shapes. It only takes minutes to get several iterations, that you can choose the best one from. You can even erase from the displacement parts you don't like, or mix different displacement maps. It's a really creative tool that's bound to make your sculpting workflow more exciting.

You’ll learn about:

• Designing tiling displacement maps in Blender

• Modeling techniques for tiling maps

• The best way to bake and export these maps

• Using them in your Sculpting workflow

• Erasing parts non-destructively

• Mixing different ones together

• Creating interesting concepts quickly

Hard Surface VDMs

(Vector Displacement Maps)

Vector Displacement maps are a great new way of adding big details in Sculpt Mode.

But they're more suited to organic things, because you can only create them by sculpting on a Plane, right?

Nope - I'll show you how to turn any model into a VDM. Now you can add complex geometry super fast in Sculpt Mode.

Pipes and Cables

We explore modeling techniques and modifiers that allow us to create flexible set-ups for cables.

By using modifiers we can make them as long or short as we want, and use Start and End caps.

We can then place them anywhere on our model for additional hard surface coolness.

About your teacher

Hi, my name is Jan van den Hemel. If you've been learning Blender for a while, you may have encountered my "Blender Secrets" 1-minute tutorials at some point.

I've been 3D sculpting since around 2006 (in ZBrush at first, and then later with Blender). Since 2017 I worked as a freelance motion graphics and 3D artist, but nowadays I work full-time teaching Blender online.

I've always been passionate about designing robots and mechs, and want to share everything I've learnt on this topic so far with you.

What do you need for this course?

  • Blender :-) I used version 3.6 LTS.

  • No paid add-ons needed, all done with vanilla Blender. In the course l use some add-ons that come with Blender by default.

  • You will need a computer that has enough memory for sculpting. Most current computers are more than capable of this. The workflow I use splits the robot up into several objects with Multires modifiers, the displayed viewport subdivisions of which can be turned low or off while you work on other objects, to keep the memory requirements as low as possible for sculpting.

  • I recommend a graphic tablet such as a Wacom tablet (or any other brand, they are all fine). You could use a mouse (I sometimes do, when I feel too lazy to use the pen) but honestly it's better to use a pen. I use a 20-year old Wacom Intuos 2 myself.

  • Some basic Blender experience would definitely be a good idea. But no prior sculpting experience is required. We start simple and slowly ramp up the difficulty.

  • For the refining of the thumbnail sketch, I used Krita which is also an open-source app. So you can also install that for free if you want.

Length of the course:

  • The total length of the edited and narrated videos is 5 hours and 54 minutes. The 10 hour sculpting sessions is edited down to 2 hours and 23 minutes of narrated content.

  • The other 3 hours and 31 minutes cover many tricks and techniques for producing assets that greatly speed up and improve your sculpts, like alpha textures, tiling displacement maps and VDM brushes, as well as procedural cables.

  • The full sculpting recording is also included, and a small timecode in the right bottom corner allows you to find the same spot from the edited version in the longer video, if you need it. But I highly recommend just watching the edited, narrated version.

Subtitles

Besides the hand-written English subtitles, there are translated version available for the following languages (so far):

  • German

  • Spanish

  • French

  • Japanese

  • Korean

  • Chinese (traditional)

If you want to see your language added to the subs, please let me know! Keep in mind, these are translated using Google translate based on the handwritten English subs. So there might be some mistakes in them. But definitely better than auto-translated based on automatic subtitles like you would see on YouTube.