Ron's Ripped Fabric Brushes --…
Daz 3D Forums > General > The Commons>Ron's Ripped Fabric Brushes --…
Ron's Ripped Fabric Brushes -- Tutorials on how to use
rnollman
Posts: 310
in The Commons
Looking for a tutorial on how to use Ron's Ripped Fabric Brushes in Photoshop. I installed them, but am clueless how to use them. I know how to set up layers in Photoshop and composite, but I just cannot figure out what to do with his ripped fabric brushes. Say for example, to create a scene with someone with torn jeans using a DAZ scene and then compositing in Photoshop.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Personally I use them to create an alpha channel/texture for the texture on the jeans, not for post work.
I can show you how to do both of those things, but it will be a few hours. No worries if someone steps in before me.
OK, the easier way, and in my opinon not quite as good looking, is basically just to render your picture. Open the render in the image editor of your choice. Grab a flesh color from the skin of your model, color pick from a darker section, and stamp the brush in the desired area. You might have to play around with this and experiement with drop shadows to get something convincing.
Option 2, browse to the texture folder of the texture you wish to modify, and open that in your image editor. Duplicate it so you dont accidentaly save over it. Create a new layer, and stamp your brush in the place you want it, using black.
Put a white layer under the black layer and save that as a jpeg.
Put this new map in the opacity channel, or cutout opacity, and render.
That is really all there is to it. I didn't use the best brush at the most optimal size for this render, but you get the idea. Shout if you have more questions.
Edit: one other thing I just thought of would be to render once with the clothing, and render another time without the clothing. Use the brush as a mask layer to mask out the skin part you want showing, and layer with the clothed render. Honestly though, it is probably easier, and much faster, to make a custom opacity map for your render.
Well that sounds easy enough. I can never remember where to put what maps so that is quite helpful. I don't have the ripped fabric yet but its pretty high on the wishlist
The problem I have with this technique is that the brush seems inverted i.e.. what should remain (the loose threads) are deleted and the holes that should be removed are still in the texture. Do you see what I mean? Your examples have floating dots that don't connect to anything, so it doesn't really look like ripped clothing. Is there a good way to reverse this effect?
Maybe the flesh color should be reversed so that the speckled dots etc are the flesh instead of the fabric (I hope that made sense) It looks like most of these have more connecting threads than this particular brush.
The particular brush I used in the example would be a big hole with stray threads of the original fabric barely clinging on. There would be small cross fibers holding the remaining denim bits (floating dots) in place. That doesn't really show up in the image though. You could probably make a negative brush by stamping the brush black on a white background, and then inverting that and saving as a custom brush. YMMV depending on software used.
Is this one a better example?
Thanks, DG! Now, opacity maps I've become very familiar here of late. I can handle that! Yay, me. However, I never thought to use these brushes like this. Thanks for a new technique for me to try out! I'll give it a shot on my next render.
Thanks DestinysGarden! Just put this brush set into my cart; it looks great. I didn't notice it when I bought the incredibly awesome 'Ron's Space Brushes' Set and the wonderful 'Ron's Antique Glass Plate Textures' yesterday.
Thanks for the tips on how to use the brushes Destiny, appreciated you offering your help :)
Thanks for the tip on the new brush creation. I'll give that a try.
you (daz vendors ) are all really kind and great guys,, strongly impressed,,
(and I really like to tweak opacity (cut out in iray) mat with mix translucency,,
)
then some products (with Ron brushes set include Destiny and Inanae grory items,,,, ) are thrown in my cart now,,,,
Browsing to the texture folder is always a problem. I have a hard enough time finding the products I buy in Content Manager after I have installed them. Any simple tips to finding the texture folder? I tried for a dress product and could not find it.
Create a layer in Photoshop (my tool of choice) with the texture map with a copy of the texture map (in this case the jean texture map) with the brush filled with black stamped on it. Correct?
Create a new layer that is all white underneath. What does that do?
Then merge the two layers into one jpeg file. Correct?
Put the new map in the opacity channel or cutout opacity -- which one? -- where? How do you put a new map in the opacity channel? How do you cutout opacity?
So when I render the scene with the woman in the jeans, what is actually going on? Is it difficult to explain?
In D|S go to the surface (in the Surfaces tab) that has the texture you want, click on the icon in the desired node (Base Color, for example), and hover. Shown is the texture for that surface. Now, click the Browse button to open the containing folder. Scroll to the file, and simply drag and drop it into your graphics program. (Works in most versions of Windows; don't know about Mac, but I assume it has similar functionality,.)
When a texture is open for editing be careful what you do with it. It's always best to make a copy of it first before editing. When possible, create layers and make changes in the layers. Save as a PSD or layered TIF (as a "master" file), and output a new JPG from it. This way, you can more easily go back and change things. For brushes, it's almost always better to apply the brush in a layer, or use as a layer mask, rather than "stamp down" the brush directly into the texture image. When you do that it's harder to go back and change things.
Just remember: layers are your friend.
In the surfaces tab, hover your mouse over the image, and the file path is there. Or click on the image map, and use the top option Browse... It will open up the folder that the texture is in.
Correct.
You have the stamp in black, so you need a white layer under it so that your resulting image map is pure black and white. The black parts become transparent, and the white parts of the map remain solid. Shades of grey will be partially solid or transparent.
Merge to a jpeg, because Daz Studio sometimes does not like it when pngs are used in the textures. Jpegs are safer.
Opacity is for the Daz default 3Delight shader. Cutout Opacity is for the Iray Uber shader. They are different names for the same function. Click on the drop down arrow, and browse to wherever you saved your image map. It doesn't matter where you saved your custom texture images as long as you know how to find them again. I have a folder in my Documents folder for my working texture files.
The render is taking our new opacity map and the white parts on the map are keeping the original denim texture, unchanged. The black part on the opacity map is making that section of the jeans invisible, so the skin underneath is showing through. Basically, I cut a hole in the jeans.
Brushes are 2D and and often with no tonal gradation, so they can impart a flat "pasted on" look when applied to three dimensional objects. One way to get a better look with a brush set like this, especially when used as an opacity mask in D|S, is to apply the brush with some levels of gray to simulate the effect of shadow and depth. There are several ways of doing this. One method is to "double strike" the brush onto two separate layers, and offset them slightly. Make one a little less opaque. This helps to give the cut-away some depth.
An example of what I'm talking about is shown here. I stamped down a brush at 100% opacity in one layer, duplicated it, offset the dupe slightly, and lowered its opacity to 50%. When the resulting image is used in the Cutout Opacity node (talking Iray here), there's a little more added depth. Adjusting the lighting and "relaxing" the fit of the jeans helps a lot, too. (If you apply a smoothing modifier and get a really tight fit, and can't adjuist it otherwise, you might think about a geometry shell between figure and clothing, to give some space between.)
The point here is that seldom can you simply use a brush as ink over some image, and expect it to look like what you want. It takes some effort -- and usually several layers -- to get something that looks acceptable.
Very good example and tips Tobor. It looks good.
A note about jeans: there's often a white frayed cloth fringe to it that might be worth doing as a second layer.
Greetings,
Shouldn't the Layered Image Editor be useful for this?
-- Morgan
This worked great for making some ripped jeans!
However I also purchased rons rips for breaking holes in doors.
Converted a door to use IRAY Uber. I think the map in base color is tiled so it's not as simple to position the holes as it would be with clothing where you get the entire texture in one jpg. Still, I punched a ton of holes into a black/white opacity map and added it to Cutout Opacity.
Door still looks brand new (see attached iray preview) as if it's just ignoring the cutout opacity. Any ideas?
Thanks for reminding me I bought this product. Kinda forgot about it
I figured out my hole-in-door problem. The Base color map is huge, 4096x4096. The door is using just a small subsection of this map.
I found the subsection it uses by dragging a LIE image around until it appeared in the render.
Is there an easier way to determine this in the future? I.e., how to know which section of a large map will be utilized by a specific surface?