REAL-TIME TEXTURE PAINTING IN BLENDER

I love the look of grungy, worn sci-fi props, and having recently spent some time brushing up on my hard-surface modelling skills, I wanted to share how easy it is to set up a really good-looking shader in Blender, one that you can actually paint in real time to get the exact look you want.

We’re going to create a basic dirty paint shader and paint on the model directly to reveal the metal underneath. Then we’ll work with the shader nodes so that the painted map can also create an undercoat of a different colour and a bump map. After that, you can just have fun painting all that damage in real time! Finally, we’ll take a look at how easy it is to add painted decals.

Keep in mind this is not a one-click solution, but the basic paint setup is very simple. We’ll be using Blender’s Eevee viewport, which will keep everything real time, and for final rendering, I’d advise using Cycles, which will really crank up the realism.

For this tutorial, we’re just going to focus on the main body of a sci-fi crate, but for the final image, I used the same technique on a few of the other model parts. The goal here is to introduce you to the fact that Blender can paint complex shaders almost as well as any other program out there, and to show you just how easy it is to set up.

01 QUICK AND EASY UV UNWRAPPING

With the main body of the model selected, go to the UV Editing workspace using the tabs at the top of the UI. It should be in Edit Mode automatically now, but