Broken buildings - vertex paint or use masks?

jordank95

Im making a bunch of broken buildings for a war scene where the materials blend between bricks/plaster where its broken. Ideally I would use vertex paint to make buildings look different, but that would involve me vert painting a bunch of buildings, which is fine but a little time consuming... but I would get more variety that way. Is there a better method for this like maybe using masks? I feel like if I used masks each building would look the same with no option to blend between materials. Any other good methods or is the vertex blend method Im using fine?

okidoki

• Vertex Paint --> individual differences by multiple vertex-paint
• Mask --> repeated differences or multiple masks to image-paint

Your decision.. 

Ghogiel

Both. You'll probably use vert paint, being cheap and effective way to blend materials, and probably masks, even if it's just a basic noise and gradient  material function to break up vertex paint blending or height lerp from a height imput for example. 

Also don't forget decals on top of what ever solution you use. 

poopipe

the simplest thing to do is chuck a world space noise texture or two in there to modulate your texture masks 

you can do cleverer things but theyre all based off that principle

This is a quick mock up in designer (the noise and incoming gradient are both moved to -1:1 range, added together and the result clamped between 0&1) 
the more gradual the gradient is the more flexibility you have in the material to mess with shapes but the les control you have over where it happens so there'll be a bit of fiddling to do