Master the advanced skills of using the paint bucket tool to paint and modify material on a carousel horse model in sketching software. Gain insights into the various techniques and controls that can broadly or specifically alter your model's colors and patterns.
Key Insights
- The paint bucket tool can be used to modify the colors and materials of a model, and specific keyboard controls offer different painting behaviors, such as painting a single surface, a series of connected surfaces, or all surfaces of a certain color in a model.
- The 'shift' key modifies the paint bucket tool to change all surfaces of a specific color in the model, regardless of their connectivity, while the 'control' key changes the tool to only affect connected surfaces of the same color.
- The combination of 'shift' and 'control' keys allows the paint bucket tool to change the color of non-connected but consistent geometry surfaces.
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So in this video, we are going to work on our carousel horse, and we will look at the various material options for the Paint Bucket tool and painting materials. If you will, let's first open the carousel horse file. So go to File, Open, and then find the Carousel-Horse.skp in your SKP101 file downloads folder in your C drive.
Click this and then select Open. Here is our already modeled carousel horse full of, you know, very colorful patterns for the saddle and the bridle. If you go to your Materials dialog box right here and open this and click the home button, you can see all the materials that we currently have in our model.
There are currently 16 different materials. We have already learned about painting materials, so you know the typical process is go to your Paint Bucket tool, and then we can go from here. We can select colors. You know I'm going to select this light pink color, and let's paint the saddle.
You know that if you use the left mouse button, you can actually paint a surface, and by doing so, we can change the color of a single face or a series of connected faces with hidden edges. However, if I wanted to change the color of, say, all of these blue faces, I will select a new color. I will select this color orange C05, and holding the Shift key, take note of our little paint bucket icon.
If I hold Shift, now there appear three red squares next to it. That means it'll change, and then if I click this, it'll change all of that material that was currently blue to orange. So holding Shift with three red squares will change all of that color in the entire model, whether it's connected or not.
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Holding the Control key shows these three red squares in a line. This means that it will only change the colors that are connected. You see the difference with the three squares connected versus three squares separated, right?
So this will change all of that material in the entire model non-connected, and the three squares will only change the colors that are connected. For example, if we wanted to change only the bridle green and not all of this green—like for demonstration purposes, if I want to change the bridle to be, let's do this nice bright blue color. You know, if I was holding Shift with the separated squares and paint this green, it would paint everything blue.
I'm going to undo that, but if I hold down Control and just paint this the blue color, it would only paint the bridle. It's a very useful tool in painting multiple faces, whether or not in the entire model or just in selected areas. Next, I'm going to zoom in, and I'm going to clean up the paint.
I want to paint some of these areas that aren't connected that we do want to add to that same color. There we go, and lastly, the final tool that I want to show would be the combination of Shift and Control, and you can see that there are three squares in a vertical alignment with a red square in the middle, and let's show you what that does. If I want to paint this white space here and this white band right here, as you can notice there's also another white area here.
If I go to let's see what color I want to paint this as—I'll paint this as a nice kind of red color. If I hold down Shift, it will change all of those colors that are non-connected. I'm going to undo that, and you know, holding Control will change anything that's connected, so because these two are not connected, it would only paint this one right here.
So holding down CTRL PLUS (+) Shift to get this one and selecting your material, you can paint these two because these will paint two surfaces of the same material that are not connected but are part of the whole consistent geometry. If I go to my Select tool and I triple-click this geometry, you can see that this is one geometry piece that's all connected, and this is something different, so it wouldn't touch that, and it wouldn't change that. So those are the very useful tools to use with the Paint Bucket tool.
Feel free to play around with your horse, changing the materials, changing the colors, and just, you know, make this as unique to you as possible. When you're happy with your horse, save the file, and I will see you in the next video.
