LogIn
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:
Follow passivestar on X/Twitter for more amazing projects and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
An Ornament alpha/brush set for ZBrush, Substance Painter, Quixel DDO and NDO, etc. 55 brushes and height/alpha maps, all 2048x2048 16bit in Tiff, Jpeg, PSD, Photoshop ABR brushes, as well as ZBrush Brushes.