procedural texturing a spitfire
This shows a re-texture of a model I made over a decade ago. Substance painter was only used for the creation of the flat camouflage colours and a few simple masks.
The rest, including the UV generation and displacement texture was done through custom tools I created in Houdini. Having gone through most of the same work in Substance Painter I came to the conclusion it didn't like dealing with many layers over lots of udims at high resolution (half an hour to load or save the file) and also there were some things I wanted to do that Painter doesn't. So I decided to see how far I'd get by doing all of it in Houdini instead. This is the current result.
In the animated gifs you can see some of the layers build up. Bear in mind that this is for a very heavily weathered aircraft that has seen a lot of use and not much time being cleaned and polished, it's relatively easy to reduce some of the layers to make a cleaner output.
A closeup on the nose area. The subtle brown smudges really help break up the surface and make it feel more dirty. It's amazing how hard it is to distinguish panel lines that have been modeled from those that are displacement (most of what you see here).
Some of the procedurally created masks for oil spills, rain drips and grime. This part of the aircraft alone uses a 4K set of maps.
Close up on refueling area showing procedurally generated fuel spills.
A selection of layers showing the buildup, similar to the process for a model kit. A lot of the geometry detail is achieved through displacement mapping which is again created with a lot of procedural tools based on simple input geometry in UV space.
The rivets each have a different height offset and dent of the main skin. They pick up dirt and grime.
The top of the wing shows how individual panels on the aircraft are part of the displacement map in a nice overlapping way and pick up grime and dirt. Exposed edges are more likely to receive edge wear.
Areas that see lots of foot traffic (like the wing root) pick up a lot of muck from shoes. Each wing has an 8K map.
This shot shows the rainstreaks (the light grey ones going down) quite well. These aircraft were always parked outside, so rain would deposit dirt on the way down.
The bottom of the wing. You can see how some rivets pick up more dirt than others. This is based on how much they stick out from the surface.
