Imperfections for Texture and Look Dev By Zak Boxall

Gallery of examples on Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qAkqne

These textures are compatible with any renderer or software package. As a bonus I've just uploaded v1 of my slowly growing collection of Mari Gizmos.

Full tutorial here: https://youtu.be/pNPlOHMkqkk

Nowadays we are getting closer and closer to our models, which is creating the need to have a much higher level of fidelity on our surfaces. Over the past few years I've been working more procedurally and layering up my textures.

But the problem that I've always had is trying to make those imperfections feel natural and realistic. The real world is full of random nuances that are so hard to recreate in CG. I've used textures generated from images I found online, and tried to recreate masks of what, failing that I’ve resorted using Designer to make what I need from scratch procedurally. However the problem is, it's so difficult to separate what you need from images, and procedurally generated grunges don't have the fidelity nor naturalistic nuances that I’m always looking for. So I decided to make my own texture pack by hand.

Using my experience in texturing and lookdev, I’ve made these textures to try to accomplish the subtle imperfections that you see in the real world.Included in this pack are 50 hand created greyscale scans. They are crisp and sharp, with a mid point of 0, which makes it really easy to overlay or mix into your material stack or shader network. The beauty about using these overlays is they can be as heavy or as subtle as you need them to be. None of the maps are clipped to ensure a nice falloff, and can be graded to do whatever you need from them. I did a load of super quick examples to show you how these maps can be used to create lots of different looks.

How you can use these:

• Smudges across surface to break up specular reflection

• Add micro dust onto surface

• Natural organic imperfections in colour

• Scratches to reveal shaders - such as scratching of paint

• Micro scratches in surface, bump, displacement, can be converted into a normal map.

• Massive variety of grunges both high and low frequency to add details onto specular, add details into surface, bump, displacement and displacement.

• Grunges can be used as procedural masks to reveal different shaders, such as dirt, mud, oil, blood, chipping of paint - whatever you want.

• Drip moisture maps to simulate dried residue on glass - variation of frequencies.

You can use either the 4k or 8k sizes. They are all made tillable by hand to ensure they’re seamless with no soft transitions in texture. You can use these maps for VFX, games, arch vis - essentially any CG model that needs natural breakup in the surface. If you use these textures in any of your projects, I would love for you to get in touch and show me some of your renders! 

For any institutions or universities looking to purchase this commercially, please get in touch and we will work something out.