Generating gradient textures in Blender?

armagon

I've seen some nice plugins for Maya that allow you to bake gradient textures for your models, making it easier to handpaint details after. Some even add effects on edges, etc.

Does anyone recommend anything for Blender?

birb

What about the Gradient Texture node? It has a few shapes and you can control position and interpolation through Mapping and ColorRamp nodes.

pior

Yeah - you can use the gradient node, but also a ton of other things : baking an AO pass, an Object Space normalmap (the green channel of which will give a mask for everything facing up), tiling any texture that you want for details, which you can then mask using a texture painted directly in Blender, or using vertex colors, and so on. And then you can bake that from one object ot another, or from within a single object from one UV channel to another. It's extremely powerful, not only for "handpainted" lowpoly but also to generate a rich base for highpoly models which can then be baked down.

In many regards this makes Blender way more flexible than Substance tools as the texturing work can be started non-linearly on both high and low - as opposed to having to wait for the final low to be modeled, unwrapped, and baked.