Decal Guns
sublime tool
These are screenshot of Unity, No actual texturing done on this. Custom normals for edge highlights. All details are decals. Edge wear, dirt and grunge controllable in the surface shader in real time.
Blender(DECALmachine, HardOps), Unity3D, a little bit of Substance Designer(baking AO and Curvature and combine them with DECALbakes to create channel packed 'masks' map to feed into the surfface shader and control weathering). Grunge, dirt, edge wear - all using a mix of 256px tileable textures.
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Not sure what it is, aliasing artefacts, post processing, the material setup or something else?
Maybe you can post a shot of the first image without post process and one with normal map only?
Ask yourself, what is the purpose of these pictures — to show off your work, or to show off your renderer's effects?
and without decals + without surface shader:
original for comparison:
Some more, because of how easy and quick it is to create these:
I'm no fan of the over the top post processing effects, would turn them down a lot or switch of some of them.
Sub Machine Gun vid
Demo of how the Surface Shader does grunge and wear using tiny tilable textures and a single small to mid res masks texture per asset
Also, I did a few grenades
As always, everything rendered in unity.
Bonus, theming a grenade, quick and easy
As a side note, the grumpy old bastard in me really wants to know how you handle LODs with this arrangement,
Did you make a custom shader to get the mesh decals working in inside of unity? Last time I checked you needed a custom shader to do the decals in unity.
I'm sure there's a good solution, I was just wondering whether it was a solved problem or not.
I can see games with crazy customization going this route, using a huge material library of smaller tiling texture more generic materials and low res masks to drive blends between them, while either relying on details from a unique normal map in channel 2 or geo normals to drive details. and then add the decals on top for extra sexyness.
That way the materials could be used across characters, environments and vehicles but pull from a common pool which would have the side benefit of everything being extremely consistent in terms of material definition across the board. like the gold used on armors is the same material used on the guns, its just broken up using masks to drive where it appears on the model. I am pretty sure destiny 2 is doing something like this for its weapons and armor sets, due to the crazy amount of customization the player can do.
the thing i love about this age of art creation is there is 1000+ ways to skin a cat and people are creating art in new and more efficient ways every day. usually you are bound by what your engine is good at doing, and recognizing that and going all in on that workflow tends to yield optimal results. but TIME is usually the god that dictates all, and finding ways to save that is incredibly valuable.