Mud splatter on truck

[eilsoe]

Hey all

I do truck renders on a daily basis, and just got sick of seeing the same clean surfaces. So I decided to try and dirty it up a bit, while still keeping it in a studio environment :)

It's still very much a work in progress, as it's become sort of a mission for me to get it as realistically dirty as I can. I liked the look of the last test render, so I just wanted to share it, and perhaps reap some tips for making the effect better.

[snakebox]

The detail is really nice, but it does look a bit like a mud explosion happened underneath the car, more so than a result of driving through a muddy environment :D

[romullus]

The mud coverage might be overdone, but i really like the result. Would love to learn how it was created :]

[eilsoe]

Thanks for the replies :)

The effect is probably a tad overdone. The initial reference photos I found had a coverage similar to this, so that's what I went with. Going through a fresh round of references, I think I'm going to re-do the ffect with a slightly lowered coverage, and having 2 separate layers of mud. An inner dried layer, and a fresh wet layer lower on the truck. I think that might sell it a bit more.

As for the effect itself, it's made using only materials on an instanced group of the outer geometry. I basically took the outer layer of the car + parts (headlight glass cover, plastic covers etc), and instanced them. I then applied the mud material on this group, using a the blendedboxmap to wrap the entire thing correctly. The front/back of the car share a splatter texture, and the sides share one too.

This gives me even control over the texture placement over the entire model, as opposed to having to hook up the blendedboxmap to several separate textures for plastic, glass, chrome, carpaint etc.

The mud material is basically a brown wet material, masked out by a splatter texture (made in PS using splatter brushes), and a noise map for displacement. The carpaint material also has a dusty/dirty layer that fades in on the lower parts of the car.

The tires also have an instanced model of the themselves with a mud material, only using different blend textures/methods.


I'll post an update once I get the dual mud layer working :)

[Nekrobul]

Very good for a start. But there is couple of thing to work on.

1 - it looks like it was not going trough the mud but was just sprayed with the mud with some artistic approach )

2 - Mud on the tires surface will be in the most cases be flat (fig 1) and will stack in curvarures of the tire.

3 - Notice the direction for the mud (Fig 1 Fig 2)

4 - Dry layer of the mud (that dust) should replicate same direction as the mud and should look like leaks ( slightly visible on fig 2)

Hope this will help )