How to add nails to wood?

Development Asset Creation
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1

I have a tiling wood material but I need to add nails in certain places, how could I add these nails to these specific places. I don’t want to have to bake textures since these are large props and I was tiling the wood, also I have so many different shapes of beams that I would have to bake many different materials for. I don’t want to model them neither since it would be too many tris. I am also recicling this material for the beams of the tower ceiling, the stairs and the railing, so these would require many different bakes, with large texture resolutions.

Also, how would you make the corners of the walls less sharp? Bevel? Or maybe cut little pieces of it so to make it an irregular pattern?

Pd: ignore the stairs and the black stripes, I am still making them.

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2

That depends on how meshes are created.

If you have skinned meshes (ie. non repeatable texture) you can paint mask (bw or one of RGBA chanels). Then blend it with material (using lerp or blending nodes).

However if you are using generic textures, and uvs of meshes are not skinned (not all in single 1uv space) you can use vertex color to blend:

  • create blending material that blends two textures based on vertex color.
  • create nail texture, RGBA and normal map and all that.
  • use for eg alpha of that nail texture as additional blend info.
  • using vertex color blend in nail texture, then remove excess stuff by using alpha from it. (for eg linear interpolate with vertex then again linear interpolate with alpha) so only things with correct vertex color and alpha are transferred over.
  • however there is additional problem of uvs that need to be copied from nail not from mesh, and that i cannot solve without making such material.
3

So make a new material that would be a nail texture with alpha mask?

Then I would use it on some vertices that I would have painted using a lerp node and the vertex color as a mask? Therefore it would be a double mask? I guess that I would also need more subdivision in my objects to apply the vertex color nails in the proper place?

I do not understand your last point. What would be the uv problem? Overlapping faces?

Also, would you bother adding nails? Or should I just leave it like this?

4

Make new material that has vertex color and alpha mask blending.
then blend bricks and nails.
However first problem of uvs for nails texture needs some solution.

Or you can make it all simple with editing meshes and making it multimaterial: one for bricks one for nail/metal elements

Or add nails as instanced meshes.