Using brushes to create rigid pieces' textures (like scales)

[Víctor Paredes]

I have been thinking a lot about fishes and scales and how that kind of texture made of small rigid pieces could be created in Moho.
Some days ago, I finally realized there's a way to use brushes, always keeping the same amount of scales, even when the shape grows.
Here are some examples of the idea. In the corner, you can see the brush used for each example:







I'm planning to create a tutorial showing the technique (hopefully) soon.

[hayasidist]

I'm very interested in this! I, too, had that "challenge" some while ago -- which I addressed by breaking the line into many separate segments, where alternate segments were sized so that "odd numbered" ones had just one brush image per segment and larger "even numbered" ones, used only for separation, were hidden.

[MrMiracle77]

I tried making a few 'outlineless' rigs recently and found that brushes do a much better job of creating shaded surfaces compared to solid shapes (masking works the same for both).

[Víctor Paredes]

A similar technique can be used to have vectors with special borders.
In the movie we are working now, we needed to have some characters with brushes over the strokes, but the design of those brushes is very different to a normal brush, with many more irregularities and cut pieces.
After testing different ways to achieve the effect, I got the idea of using a mesh to move the main vector shape and also different layers adding and removing lines to the shape.
This is a very rough example of how this works

PS: the mesh is pretty normal, but I hid the vector point in the middle in which all the triangles are connected. It just looks nicer that way

[Greenlaw]

Whoa! That's very cool Victor! Thanks for sharing...I'll have to think about how I can use this idea on my next project.

[Víctor Paredes]

Thanks!
I just recorded a quick messy tutorial

[funksmaname]

Awesome technique!

[SimplSam]

Great ideas. The examples with the grass motion and grass arm really worked for me.

[hayasidist]

love the use of the scatter brush colour jitter for the stroke!

[SuperSGL]

I tried just the scatter brush sometime ago for vegetation, really bogged down the computer (I used vector thinking it would be less memory intensive then png's) From your example it looks like you bi passed this memory usage. I also tried using a created brush as a texture put it inside a mask and used bones to animate the shape. If I was really careful and didn't animate the whole shape I could get away without too much distortion. Really looking forward to trying out your example! For me this is huge! working in 3d I use textures all the time especially for clothing and as I mentioned vegetation. Thank you for doing the work this is really awesome technique!

[Víctor Paredes]

Yesterday I was looking at Nathan Pangilinan work and thinking in a way to rig and animate hair in the style he paints it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B4IFxALA_1j/
Then I realized the technique here could be the way to go:







Of course, the result is not exactly the same as the illustration, but I'm happy with it as a proof of concept.

[Greenlaw]

Ha ha! Great idea Victor. It looks fantastic and makes me want to make something fuzzy myself.