How To Quickly Get Game-Ready Edge Wear In Blender

3D Artist and Game Developer Tim Greenberg, known online as passivestar, shared a technique for achieving game-ready edge wear on any geometry. This method, made entirely in Blender, utilizes the free and open-source tools DreamUV and Ucupaint.

DreamUV, a set of tools for UV manipulation in the 3D viewport, includes the HotSpot feature, which attempts to automatically UV unwrap a mesh based on a predefined texture atlas. The atlas uses a reference mesh to divide the texture into regions and matches each face of the mesh to the best-fitting region using hard edges and seams. Theoretically, you could use Zen UV, which also has hotspotting, but in this example, the artist is using a DreamUV hotspot atlas within Ucupaint, a texture layer management tool.

The edge wear layer impacts all channels, including roughness and metalness, and can be baked with a single click in Ucupaint. According to passivestar, it's compatible with any game engine, and the glTF exporter will even channel-pack the maps for you.

For the modeling here, the artist used a custom Blender productivity-boosting add-on called Quick Menu:

Take a look at some recent passivestar's Ucupaint experiments below:

Last year, passivestar joined 80 Level to tell us more about managing a YouTube channel and producing video tutorials, working in Blender 4.0, and making powerful tools with Geometry Nodes tools:

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