Hey guys, I was wondering what workflow people use to grunge up and chip away at realistic wood. I'm trying to detail the wood of a Martini-Henry, and I'm kinda lost as to where to start.

So far I've got the base texture, as generated in Wood Workshop, and I've been taking chips and kinks from photos of wood and then trying to use those in the texture. Trying to colour match or use them as an alpha.

Here's a decent reference of the wood:


Although looking at it more closely it's all pretty smooth and kinda lacquered, so maybe just using alphas of scratches and dints with a suitable layer would work...

Any suggestions would be super-useful. Thanks!

I'm going to be trying to do the same thing with a wooden coffee table. I'm going to try to add the dints and scratches into the specular map. I don't want to really dent it in the normal map, but I want to show it when light is reflecting so thats where I'm going to put it.

scratches you can pass off easily with specular maps. dints would be more of a normal map thing since the way we recognize dints on objects is the bending of light.

If this is for a first person weapon then you should do the scratches in zbrush or mudbox. It's pretty quick and easy to do this and will be a noticeable improvement in quality for something close to camera.

Originally Posted by sprunghunt

If this is for a first person weapon then you should do the scratches in zbrush or mudbox. It's pretty quick and easy to do this and will be a noticeable improvement in quality for something close to camera.

This is probably overkill, unless you already are sculpting the model for some strange reason, editing your meshto be "zbrush friendly", adding insane levels of sub-division to get pixel level detail, dealing with massive files and bake times to bake it all down.... Not to mention doing it all over again if you want to make any changes!

Really a waste of time when you can do this sort of detail really quickly with photoshop + crazybump, ndo, etc.

Ah... and I've totally spent a couple of hours in zBrush already. Ha. Okay, well, I'll finish this off and see if I can replicate it using Photoshop and a normal program later on.

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

This is probably overkill, unless you already are sculpting the model for some strange reason, editing your meshto be "zbrush friendly", adding insane levels of sub-division to get pixel level detail, dealing with massive files and bake times to bake it all down.... Not to mention doing it all over again if you want to make any changes!

Really a waste of time when you can do this sort of detail really quickly with photoshop + crazybump, ndo, etc.

Well there are tools that make all of this much easier. Like the various re meshing options in zbrush. For really small divots crazy bump might be ok.

But if you're going to see modeling mistakes it'll be on a first person weapon. So I wouldn't call it overkill.