Dirty'in it up...

[tcoursey]

I have seen a few posts talking about dirtying up things. Of course the nature of computer generated art is that it is clean by default. Are there some techniques, shaders, plugins that help make things look not so perfect and clean?

Any ideas or direction would be great! Thanks.

[Rory_L]

Oh boy, where to start! :) You can get dirtied sufaces quickly by throwing procedural textures into the diffuse channel. Modify the texture`s distribution with alpha-blending-mode gradient and procedural textures. For the gradient input parameters, using surface thickness or weight maps is effective.

On a complexly dirty model I regularly stack fifteen, twenty textures on top of each other to get the look I want, baking it all to an image when satisfied.

Try playing with the SG_AmbOcc shader. That can put dirt into the crevices. You can get a similar result by baking radiosity into the object, (if poly res is high enough) or to an image. The technique`s listed on the Lightwave tutorial page. Something about baking Beethoven, I seem to recall.

And don`t forget you can hand paint colour variation into vertex maps.

There are loads of other shaders that are useful for dirt. Have a look on Flay and see what takes your fancy!

Best of luck and let us see the results!

Cheers,

R

[Rory_L]

No no, you`re welcome; don`t mention it! :rolleyes: