Download - Chipped paint Lightwave3D preset

Yes, yes I know it's been a rather long time since my last update. While I have been hard at work revamping a lot of the assets, I have also been kept busy with paid jobs. In fact, this project is the only thing that keeps me from burning out from all those mundane, un-creative jobs that pays for my meals.

Anyway, I am working on a short teaser at the moment. The teaser will not only serve as a demo of the visual style and quality I'm aiming for, but also a means to experiment with my production pipeline. I've made some progress, albeit slowly, but I'm hopeful I'll get it done very soon. Oh, and having one of my workstations die on me the last weekend didn't help.

One of the things that I had started to develop early on was a metallic chipped surface shader that I could reuse (and easily modify as needed), since the story takes place on a space station where there will be many, what else, old, scratched metallic surfaces.

I have completed a version using only the layers system in Lightwave3D with procedural textures and gradients, the result of which you can see below:

A version of the shader was applied to my early prop models, such as the barrel:

You can download the preset here (Newtek Lightwave 3D v9.0 or higher required).

I am currently working on a node-only  version of the shader which will allow me to control the amount of chipped areas via a weight map, such as on the edges of an object.

Using a procedural shader saves me the trouble of painting chipped paint textures for every single object, and I don't have to worry about texture sizes since procedural textures are resolution independent. The downside of this approach is the increased CPU overhead when rendering since the textures have to be generated during rendertime. But considering the alternative of using high resolution image maps, which will incur memory overhead and possibly a larger impact on rendering time, I think it is a fair compromise, if not a solution.

Alright then, back to work!