thank you!
Firstly, thank you for testing out my project! This project was created in UE4 as a demonstration of a new possible workflow for my University Major Project, but I intend to continue to refine both my skills with Unreal Engine 4 and the workflow used to create STR. As such, I would like to ask for your feedback on the project using the feedback form to the right.
sub texture randomization
Sub Texture Randomization, is an alternate workflow that can be used when creating textures. Instead of adding scratches, damage or other randomizeable detail to the primary texture set, a second texture set is created that contains that detail.
An example of the two texture sets for one of the guns can be seen using the slider bellow. One set has next to no damage details, but it does have edge wear as we don’t want this to be present regardless. However, the second texture set has significant wear across the entire model. On it’s own, the paint is substantially more worn than I want the final product to appear.
To achieve the desired effect, we can switch between the the two texture sets using a noise map. In Unreal Engine this is done with a lerp node, in Blender it’s called a MixRGB node, but the effect is the same.
An example of how this works is bellow. As you can see, the white in the noise texture is where the damaged texture set will be shown on the final model.
As you can see, the damage is somewhat subtle on the gun, so the large patterns of white appear as smaller patches of damage. However the power pack underneath the gun has a solid “bare metal” for the damaged section instead of a huge pattern of scratches, meaning that the noise pattern lines up exactly.