There are a few things we should do to make our texture creation process easier and richer. One way is to bake textures, which automatically produces some psuedoshading and effects that saves us the effort of doing them by hand.
A good way to start texturing is to first bake an ambient occlusion map. We can overlay this onto our texture map for some added depth to our final texture.
Create a new material and name it something like “AOBake”. This won’t be put into the game; it’s purely for our purposes. Give it this node structure in the shader editor:
To bake the AO map, set the rendering engine to Cycles, and change bake type to emission. When you’re ready click, bake.
Save the new image. If you load it into your raster image program of choice, setting it to a “multiply” blending mode will let you overlay it on top of your texture artwork. I tend to also find it useful as it marks intersections of geometry, such as where a pipe might make contact with the outside of the boattail.
For a bit of extra punch, I actually bake a second time with my ambient occlusion node in the shader set to a distance of just 0.1. This second texture gets added on top of the existing texture in my image editor to really bring out the edges and silhouettes. Below is an example of the two AO bake images, then the two stacked on top of each other against a Porkjet Grey backdrop.
If you’re gunning for that restockalike look, chances are you‘ll want to get some nice edge highlighting/wear action in—it’s a faint white outline along sharp edges of all these models. As the size of models goes up, though, the process of painting them becomes exceedingly tedious: why not have Blender automate the process for you?
The shader node setup is a bit more complicated than a straightforward AO bake, so here’s mine. It’s designed to closely imitate the look of edge wear you might find on a lot of Restock or Near Future Technologies parts, with “strips” of varying brightness along the edges surrounded by some random fuzziness.
It’s quite a few nodes—don’t worry, you don’t need to touch any of it. Simply set your meshes to this material, set the image output in the node setup (the stuff in the dark red frame in the node view) to an edge wear bake file, and then bake emissive like with the AO bake technique above.
Combining the AO and edgewear bakes above with a bit of a cloudy noise in the layer stack yields the result below, without having to do much, if at all, manual texture painting. Versus having to paint all the edges manually, this can represent reducing an afternoon’s tedium to a 15 minute coffee break.
