Painting dirt onto tiled materials?

Development Rendering
1

Hey guys,

Here’s a very rough beginning scene.

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I want to add some painted detail on the floor (some soot under the stove, dust/grime in the corners).

Now, the floor is a single poly mesh. I was excited to use vertex painting using a vertex color node - but my understanding is that it won’t work with a single poly mesh. From my experiment, even a pretty high poly mesh can look janky when vertex painted.

Is there a way to go about painting on a tiled material - on a very low poly mesh - that gives smooth results?

I think I know the answer, but thought I’d ask.

Putting it differently: If you had to add some detail to this floor in specific areas, how would you go about doing it?

Thanks!

2

You might just do it with a texture mask, you could save that as an alpha channel for that wood texture.

3

just use dirt decals to project on any surface you want and high-res as you like

4

This is what I was thinking. Should I be concerned about performance? How resource heavy are decals?

Thanks!

5

That really depends on the scale of your project and how good your culling is or how you handle those things.

6

Vertex painting would be ideal, you would use a texture to control the blending between dirty and clean, instead of just relying on the vertex blending. You could get away with a pretty low poly plane, around 32 tris for a floor that large.

7

You could also add a black and white mask making use of the lightmap UVs indicating what is clean and what is dirty.