Hi, i am studying to create a game and am about to to create my assets. I will make modular assets so that i can quickly piece together a level.
First i want to model some wall pieces which will contain some wooden panels at the bottom and a wallpaper on top. I will create the materials for this model in substance painter / designer.
Example of a wall:
But if this modular wall piece has some big scratches on the wood and damage on the wallpaper, then it will be very easy to see the repetition if i want to use this wall piece to create a corridor.
Do we create multiple different textures to avoid this? Or can i procedurally add random damage to these pieces with a mask inside the material?
Or perhaps paint a mask on top of it (like a paint brush containing a damaged wallpaper material and painting on top of the wallpaper to damage that part).
Two of the most common ways to add detail, damage, and wear are decals and vertex painting.
Decals are typically used to place details that have masks and blend onto the surface below it. Often used for stains, drips, cuts, damage, etc.
Vertex painting is used to blend between multiple versions of a texture. You could have a clean version and a dirty vertex with drips, and paint where you want the drips to show up. This does require having enough vertexes to paint and control the blending.
Vertex painting can get much more complex and do things like blending sand into cracks before showing up on top of bricks, or even displacing the mesh and creating puddles. Lots of crazy demos on youtube.
There’s other approaches as well like blending between 2 textures based on world position or height, or just layering multiple textures at different scales so the tiling doesn’t match up or look obvious.