Rendering cars using code

Development Rendering
1

Good afternoon everyone, I am new here, so please have patience with this question, which is probably very basic to you.

Suppose an off-the-production-line car is rendered:

7191af450d19099e91d62126031e9b362ff45ae1.jpeg
7191af450d19099e91d62126031e9b362ff45ae1.jpeg1500×1000 225 KB

Now, suppose time takes its toll on this beautiful Tesla, and the once flawless car begins to rust. Suppose further that many days, weeks, years, and even decades passe, and suppose someone in possession of Unreal Engine 4 had the crazy idea of illustrating the corrosion process day after day, but was too lazy to do so manually. Instead, the person sits down and codes the incremental application of rust, saving each day in a separate image, until 100 years have passed, and the once beautiful Tesla is almost unrecognizable.

My question to you is the following: Is this scenario possible, and if so, how? I would appreciate a very general pointer, so I can go examine more for myself.

Thank you for your attention.

2

You could do that with Substance already, it offers the ability to make material changes dynamically–it has its own procedural texturing methods which you can adjust and it will convert the results to a raster image that gets applied as a texture map.

3

Yup, with a good setup, Substance or even Quixel DDO have great edge detection and weathering presets that you can mask out. And time can be handled through Unreal material editor pretty easily.