Easy Detailed Textures in Blender - Edge Wear & Grunge

okay in this one I'm going to show you how to take an empty model throw on a free Texture add edge wear and then add a bunch of additional grunge layers on top of that to make this a really interesting grungy old looking texture as opposed to just kind of like a default texture look so this is the this is the technique I use on pretty much all of my models uh I don't always add edge wear and all that but I'm using this kind of stuff all the time so yeah it's really really powerful and it's super easy to do it looks a bit complicated with all these nodes but I'll go through it and explain it one by one show you some techniques so that it's not as confusing and it's easier to mix in a bunch of different things at once okay so let's get into it okay so let me start with this empty no textured model right here and the first thing I need to do is just actually get something on here like a texture maybe from a free website so I usually use quickel Mega scans but sometimes I use free textures from like these websites right here um textures.com if you made an account on textures.com recently most most of the stuff is no longer free but if you had an account from before it's still free so there's lots of good stuff on here ambient CG is also really good they have just a lot of free 4K textures you can download uh but there's no like just regular images but it's fine same with poly Haven this is kind of similar to ambient CG um so just any of these websites have tons of free textures that you can use to follow along here so I'm going to use one from ambient CG which I've used before and I'll just show you how to set this up from nothing so I'm sure you don't how to texture like apply a basic texture to a model already but I'll just quickly run through this so we need color map uh roughness and normal normal GL that's the one that blender uses okay so these need to be non- color of course non- color non- color and we'll just take that normal map so boom run this in here run this in here run this to the roughness and run this to the color okay so standard regular texture setup right color to the color roughness to the roughness normal uh normal map through the normal map node and then into the normal input on the princial trader right regular texture setup and that gives us this okay so you can stop here if you just want a regular texture of course but I want to spice this up I want to add layers of grunge I want to add edge wear I want to make it look awesome so here's how I'm going to do that first of all I guess let's start with Edge wear so the way I like to do Edge wear is actually by using the ambient oclusion node so if you've seen a tutorial on this before a lot of people will actually use a different setup of like the bevel node with the geometry node not geometry nodes but the geometry node in the Shader editor and then you combine those in a weird way with like some Vector math node I don't like doing it that way because um it guarantees that you get like Edge wear on the inside creases where it shouldn't actually be worn so with the ambian inclusion it's it's a bit better um although that does happen a bit anyways here's how I do it ambient occlusion goes here and what I'm going to do actually is set up the ambient occlusion by itself and then mix it into the color afterwards just so that it's really clear exactly what this effect is doing so the first thing I need to do is lower the samples because I don't need 16 uh it looks pretty similar the whole way through and like whatever number you set this to doesn't matter that much just as long as it's above like three or four or five so five is going to be fine and to preview exactly what this note is doing I'm just going to control shift click on the ambient occlusion that just sends this straight out and then if you want to get back to the texture you just control shift click the principal Shader so this just previews any node uh the direct output from that node okay so let's preview this and let's work with this so ambient occlusion by default is actually the opposite of edgeware cuz it's only going to do darker parts on the inside decreases of this object so to get it to be actually doing the opposite effect if you just click this button inside and then lower the distance you will see that it's actually now highlighting or making the outside edges darker which is perfect for this Edge wear effect let me take a color ramp now and just drop it in here sorry color ramp because I want this to be very clear what this is doing so I'm going to increase the contrast and just make sure you can clearly see exactly what this effect is doing right here okay so now the thing is with Edge wear it's it's actually you kind of want the opposite of this where you want the main color to stay the same but the outside edges to become brighter than they were before so to do that I'm going to flip this around so let's take the white handle on the color ramp and just move it to the opposite side and I can just move this over here and just kind of drag this to whatever makes sense so that's going to be fine maybe just pull this up a little bit anywhere here is going to be okay and then I'm going to lower the distance down to like somewhere around here 02 01 03 somewhere in that range it depends how big the model is you're working with too but something like that is going to be fine and then this check boox right here only local just means that intersecting objects won't be affected by it so I'll just turn that on Okay so we've got this now so we've got everything is becoming black except for the edges which are becoming white but like I said I want it to be every I want everything else to stay the color it was before cuz if I If I multiply this in right now multiply is going to leave the dark parts and erase the bright Parts which I actually don't want I want the well what I just said everything to be the same and the edges to be brighter than they were so here's how you do that you could just use a mix RGB or rather a mixed color node and then like bring bring this in and then like just run this into the you know slot B and then put it on like overlay or multiply and then you could you could like that could work I'm going to lower the uh the specular here because it's just bothering me a little bit uh so that could work but you'll notice that like everything becomes very very dark uh very quickly so to kind of offset that and make it not just pitch black you can actually take the darkest point of the color ramp which is making everything dark right this value right here is what's driving that darkness and you can actually bring that up all the way to one so if it's at one right now this is doing nothing because if you multiply in a value of one it's actually not making anything darker so it's just going to stay the same right if I move the factor it's going to stay the same but so if I leave the the handle that used to be black actually at one and then I take the other handle and I move that above one to say 10 or whatever number above one enter that now everything is actually the same color it was before except the edges are now I guess 10 times brighter it's not really 10 times brighter it's just a bit brighter but any value above one is going to make that show up and this looks a bit strange cuz it's going to be like this thing is now down here but the value right here is at 10 so it's working fine okay now you can control the mix Factor right there so that's a good starting point for Edge wear if I wanted to add more detail in here I could actually add some noise in here so I might uh prev view this again uh I might just take this out and just have this kind of separate chunk running along here to demonstrate how I'm going to add noise cuz it gets a bit confusing with all these nodes together so let's take a noise texture and to get this in here so that it kind of basically I want this to erase some of the brightest points of these lines here because I don't like how it's just a solid straight clear line because for Edge wear uh you know we want to ruce actually where on the edge so I want to erase some of these points or like some of these straight lines is so here's how I'm going to do that let's take a mix color drop it in right after the ambient occlusion run the noise into slot B and then I'm just going to so if we change this to multiply that's not going to work because now we're just kind of like in a weird way if I just take a color ramp to uh to demonstrate this and increase the contrast of the noise um we're not really getting the effect that we want right because it's kind of just doing this if you switch this from multiply to something like screen or add now because this is getting inverted after we're we're actually able to erase certain parts of this which is perfect if that doesn't make sense what's happening I encourage you to just set this up yourself and then kind of move the sliders around and just change the values a bit and you'll see exactly how this is all working together okay so for the noise let's increase the scale because it's uh it's a bit too low actually before I do that one thing I need to do with this noise is actually switch it to object coordinates it's not that big of a deal but just that when you if you don't if if you leave it ungenerated sometimes the noise will get stretched out whereas object coordinates will make sure the noise is All Uniform scale all over this object okay so let me just turn the scale to something that makes sense and I'll just kind of mess around with these values until I get something that I like so something like this is going to be fine let's increase the roughness increase the roughness and then increase the uh detail not too high but something like that it's going to be fine and then we can kind of just figure out yeah like that's going to be fine just a little bit of variation in there so it's not super clean all right nice okay and then let's bring this back into this texture now so let's uh so this whole thing even though it kind of looks like a big spider web at this point there's only one output from here right every everything is running to this color ramp and the output from this color ramp is what we want to mix into here so we still have that uh multiply node from that I that I dropped in here so I can just plug that into slot B and it should be fine wonderful okay so I hope that makes sense so it's base color multiply and then the edge wear goes to slot B and then you just dial it in with the factor right here okay so that's edgear so you could stop there and i' I probably want to go in and adjust these sliders a bit and dial in uh you know get the effect a bit closer to something I I would want but this is fine for now so the next thing I would want to do when texturing this is probably mix in some other grunge materials some other like um I don't know just grungy surfaces and like kind of layer these on top of the color that's already there let me show you how I might do that so I'm going to grab something from textures.com like I said textures.com a lot of the stuff here isn't free anymore but if you made your account a while ago you'll still have access to these things for free I think but it's just like the things I'm going to use is stuff like this like you can just go out in your backyard and take a picture of like some random concrete and get something that's pretty similar or just go on a walk and like take a picture of the side of a dumpster or something you know any there's plenty of surfaces out in life that are just like grungy materials that you could just take a picture of and use which is exactly what this is and honestly if you're that lazy you could even just use AI to generate one and just use that um you could you could also go to like an uh a um stock photo website and just find some grungy material there but it's probably not going to be as nice as like a headon shot from a texture website because it's not really meant for 3D artists but that can completely work if you just use a stock photo image of like some grungy concrete or something anyways I'm going to take this or any any grungy looking thing that just has like some level of detail on it so I'll just take this and just drop it right into the Shader editor and so this is the more nodes I add in here the more confusing and intricate and spider web be it's going to be looking in here so just try to to to kind of simplify the like the visualization that you have to look at here just kind of look at the principal jader right here and then work backwards from that like instead of starting over here and trying to navigate through it left to right if you actually start on the end where there's the least amount of uh inputs on here and then work your way backwards it's going to be much easier to understand the shading setup that way cuz look right here there's only three inputs to this principal Shader two of them are just the roughness and normal so the only one going in here is the color right so we can kind of ignore everything past this point for now because that's already done so we just have to worry about this one color input and work off of this okay so let's take take this image uh I I'll go to the UV editor right here which is uh going to bring up this so whatever I have uh clicked on here is going to show up in the UV editor right so if I click that new one it's going to bring it there okay so to get this mixed in here there's a few ways we could do it but let's just take a let's take that mixed color note again so mixed color let's drop it in here and let's just run this into slot B so again we just have now a factor of fully this thing and fully whatever we had before so zero is going to be fully slot a one is going to be fully slot B which is now this image right here so to get this to mix nicely you know obviously just leaving this on 50% is not really going to do that could work but it's probably just going to look bad so what I like to do is we need something going into the factor which is either noise or grunge or even this image itself to use itself as a mask um so let me just show you a few ways you can do this let's start by plugging this image into the factor as well so what that's going to do is now the oops get out of here now the values of this picture are going to determine which parts of it get mixed into the color we had before and we can visualize this by taking a color ramp just dropping it into the factor and I'm just going to control shift click on this color ramp and we can see this right here is now what is going to be used to tell it okay how much of slot a and how much of slot B are going to be used uh and that's determined by the black and white values of this image so you if I preview this node right here we can see I can use this color ramp to just dial in exactly okay like how much of this grungy thing do I want to show up in here right so I could flip this around and kind of do this and work backwards or whatever it doesn't matter so I'll just find something that looks kind of interesting right so that's fine and if we go back here there we go now we have more stuff happening here maybe I don't really like how light it is though right so if I want to make it darker we can take a curves node a RGB curves and let's drop that into the color of this image so this is going into two slots remember the factor as well as the the actual color of slot B so I'll drop this into where it's actually the color is going in so slot B and then we can just pull this down to match it a little bit now it's getting quite saturated so maybe let's take a hue saturation put that in there decrease that a little bit maybe maybe even decrease the value a bit but just something in there to add variation to this texture is going to be a really nice way to just spice it up and make it not feel like such a you know a default material something else we could do on this Edge wear is is since we have this like kind of brown color in here right now I could go to the the brighter point on this color uh on this uh color ramp that's the The Edge wear and then just make this a bit saturated so I could bring it to like bring it a bit warmer that might be cool I like that all right nice and this we could actually swap out for whatever we want so if I don't like this one I can just drop in some random other thing try that maybe I don't like that I can just open this back up try some random other thing you know you can just easily Swap this out for whatever you want so I'm just I I kind of liked how it was before so I'll just leave that in there but yeah you could just really mess around with um different materials and you could even right now like I could just run this whole setup again like duplicate this uh try another image and layer another one on top of this cuz remember like it's going to look confusing with the more nodes we add in here but if you just remember to look at it oops look at it from this side and just kind of work backwards look the the only thing going in here is this one color input remember right because all of these things get fed into this one they end up at this one node that goes to the color because the color only has one input so it's you know if you kind of just move all that stuff off to the side and then work from this one input it's much easier to keep track of where everything is and add new materials and not get super confused as to what is even going on here okay so I might to demonstrate that I could add another one by just taking another mix node dropping another image run it to sloppy into the factor but I want to show you another way you could uh mix in another material so I'm actually going to run this let's run this out again and get rid of this I'll just move it off to the side so this is just the ambient occlusion now or the color and the ambient occlusion let me show you another way you could actually mix this in um I'll just take that same image actually so I'll just duplicate this for our demonstration let's take another mix color so instead of using itself as the mix Factor you could just use something else like a noise texture as well so if I run this to slot B and then let's take a noise texture and then that is going to be our Factor now so uh instead of this image being the factor and the black and white values determining which are slot a and which are slot B we could use a noise texture so you could run that in here color ramp again increase the contrast of the noise because it's quite soft by default and then increase the detail and uh roughness and so this is going to I need to uh you'll notice the noise it looks a little stretched out so if I contrl T switch that again to object coordinates boom and then just kind of adjust the scale back to where it was that's another thing you can do is just mix in some random image using noise as the factor the other thing you can do is actually switch this instead of mixing it in you could actually multiply this in and that will make it interact a little bit differently with the underlying material so uh you'll notice that multiplying always makes it a bit darker so I might actually take a curves node and maybe let's try making this uh making this brighter so I want to put this curves where it's where this texture is going into that color so I can just do that right here remember slot B is where it's the where the color is being affected so I'll just drop that in here and let's increase the brightness of this because I I feel like it's just too dark uh right now with this that is still kind of cool though how it's like adding a lot of darkness and really gritty grunginess to this right and you could even you know mix and match all these techniques together so you could have one that's getting multiplied in or you know you can change these to other blend modes too like it doesn't matter which one you you put on here overlay sometimes looks cool screen might look cool I usually don't use that but generally multiply and overlay or what I go for so you could do that and then you could have another texture that's getting mixed in with itself as the mix Factor you can have another one that's noises the MFA like there's so many ways you can use this um and and just kind of using different things like either noise or the texture itself as a mask that is really really powerful for just getting tons of variation and different levels of grunge and dirt and just making this so much more interesting than a default texture okay so let me add in some ambient occlusion now because we've done we've actually used the ambient occlusion node for Edge wear but you can also use the ambient occlusion node for of course regular ambient occlusion which is again adding like Shadows uh like natural Shadows into the kind of the crevices and corners of any object so let's drop that in let's take a mixed color node and again since we don't we don't I don't really want to look at all this while I'm working on this because it's just going to be confusing so I'm just going to look at again base color input there's only one thing going in here just this this one thing that everything kind of leads to I'm going to work in this space right here so let's uh to mix in the ambient occlusion let's just drop in in that mixed Color Run the am inclusion in the slot B and there we go it's doing that I might decrease the distance and now if I just switch this to multiply increase the factor and then just kind of dial in the exact distance that I want and maybe even use color ramp to uh to Just Adjust how strong this is this kind of adds additional natural looking grunge and Detail in here now the thing is about any of these effects is anytime you use a mixed color node you're going to have an option to plug something into the mix factor which is essentially going to act as a mask um so you could use the ambient occlusion as a mask for another texture if you want like if you want to have grunge only in the corners you could use that as a mask um really it's just about being creative and trying stuff and and just adding and grunge in any way you want and trying things in the M try I can't talk sorry and trying different things in that mixed Factor so I would say I'm pushing these effects quite far in this one because I want to show exactly what it can do um and also the lighting here is just basic very natural overcast lighting so it's going to be extra noticeable once this actually goes into a render though um all these effects become a little bit more subtle once you have like lighting and volumetrics and camera movement and all that so that's why I like keeping this a bit more on the extreme side because I know that like once it's rendered it's going to like these these effects looking a bit stronger I think it looks nicer for the kind of style that I like to go for but obviously Just Adjust this to however you want to do and whatever style fits whatever you're making and yeah let's do a quick before and after so this is uh if I just kind of take out all of this let's just take the oops I have to uh make this a unique texture sorry take this and let's just run this straight in here boom so it depends what you want obviously but if you want um you know a grungy old looking worn down texture this is a really nice way to do it it's just layer on these different textures throw on edge wear make it a lot more grungy and you can really get tons of different looks by just swapping out the kinds of uh image textures you throw on as those additional grunge layers on top so yeah this is pretty much the technique that I use to texture almost all of my models obviously I don't I don't always add edge wear but I often do mix in other textures other grunge Maps um ambient inclusion and yeah like really plugging things into this mix factor and just trying interesting things to go in there that's really the key here that I want to demonstrate and show that like you can do some really crazy stuff by just plugging in different images into that socket okay so yeah I hope that was useful like I said if you want to download these models um I did the same exact technique on all these here uh you can go to the link in the description there's a free pack I made it in the last video if you want to watch me make these uh the last video I did was a modeling one so you can just go and watch that anyways hope that was useful uh yeah anyways bye take care

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 33,402

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Id: dpY-wjnEosg

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024