Simulated texturing, particles and weathering?
I've unwrapped and textured a number of metallic, chipped, scarred and scratched surfaces as of late and I was wondering if any of you guys had thought about or knew of an automated solution to perform weathering on materials. This is purely hypothetical speculation, I'm not in desperate need of such a tool, but what do you all think of the possibilities of a more simulated approach to weathering and damage texturing vs image mapping and hand-painted scarring?
I'm thinking of a system that would run something as follows, you'd lay out your uv's as necessary, and then define the materials your prop or object is constructed from, probably with an RGB material definition map. I assume you'd have a myriad of sliders at your disposal to combat the photoshop-filtered look of an instantly recognizable automated effect. Then once it's all set up, this hypothetical app would take ten minutes and literally sandblast the object with a million particles, each tearing a random tiny chunk from the surface of the texture, then drop it down 5 million steps to do the same, drag it across 600,000 feet of steel surface, corrode the edges with rust, cake it with dust, etc - all depending on the predefined materials and options selected.
The detriment: the up-front work of building the tool, and simulation time to generate the effect for each asset.
The benefit: believable, consistent and realistic weathering with rapidly diminishing long-term cost per asset.
Is there any talk of this kind of stuff? I'm not advocating this kind of approach, I'm just trying to start up a technical discussion.
I'm thinking of a system that would run something as follows, you'd lay out your uv's as necessary, and then define the materials your prop or object is constructed from, probably with an RGB material definition map. I assume you'd have a myriad of sliders at your disposal to combat the photoshop-filtered look of an instantly recognizable automated effect. Then once it's all set up, this hypothetical app would take ten minutes and literally sandblast the object with a million particles, each tearing a random tiny chunk from the surface of the texture, then drop it down 5 million steps to do the same, drag it across 600,000 feet of steel surface, corrode the edges with rust, cake it with dust, etc - all depending on the predefined materials and options selected.
The detriment: the up-front work of building the tool, and simulation time to generate the effect for each asset.
The benefit: believable, consistent and realistic weathering with rapidly diminishing long-term cost per asset.
Is there any talk of this kind of stuff? I'm not advocating this kind of approach, I'm just trying to start up a technical discussion.
Replies
That way you would only have to create the "clean" base texture, then the app would do the rest for you based on however much weathering you wanted to do.
http://www.filterforge.com/
One of the cool things about FF is you can examine the guts of everyone else's filters, learn how they did it.
Oh, and if you submit a really good filter you can win a free copy of the app.