Still so meh!

Winge time

My head cold is now tracking at about 15%. It's not bad, but it's not gone. I have nasty lower-back pain, not enough to leave me immobile, but I fear that one false move might make me so. I feel like a bone from last night's fish is lodged in my throat. Clara suggests that I might be feeling just a scratch from it. I hope so! All in all, a bit shit, really.

Work will distract you!

Very possibly. I am still tweaking the material node tree that I created. After the cleaning shift, I realised that while the tree is great, my materials were subpar, and some of the tree isn't doing much. I might rebuild it this morning.

Realistic Touch

This addon (See its store page) has been gathering dust for a few years. It looked like a series of grunge maps, including both big-scale dirt and smaller fingerprint, dust and scratch mask images. In fact, it's a lot better than that because the masks are all built into very powerful nodes that offer every kind of image manipulation function: scaling, rotation, Min/Max/Contract, with selectable colour gradient and/or colour inputs.

Three realistic touch masks mixed together

Infinite grunge!

Honestly, the interactivity is broken. I make changes and either nothing seems to happen or what happens isn't very useful. I will rebuild! I'll make a generic three-texture tree with grudge, spec, ambient occlusion and whatever else.

Step one

The basics!

Just one mask to begin with - not even a material texture, yet. Grime and AO are applied and working, mostly because the UV map has been "improved".

It's a lot simpler; one of everything, but it all works.

Just needs a couple of scuffed decals.

Mix in a texture map. AO and grunge are mixed into a single texture map. The texture output is used to generate a bump map, while the dirt and AO feed the specularity—not realistic, but effective. I'll experiment a bit more with how I implement these supporting material channels.