Chipped object modelling

Hi there I have a client who wants tokens made with writing on it but he wants the token to be chipped and worn all over, kind of like this…


but with probably more exaggerated, thicker scratches and dints.

I’ve tried using alpha masks with brushes to sculpt them in (both with MultiRes and Dyntopo) but the quality of the damaged parts still seems a little low resolution (even when I use a resolution of 0.5 in Dyntopo). I can’t use normals maps or anything like that because these need to be 3d printed. It probably also doesn’t help that the sides of the tokens will have that grooved edge like on a coin.

Any help or tutorials that have helped you in the past would be appreciated.

By low resolution, do you mean a stair stepped effect? … that can be very noticeable with 8-bit greyscale. Have you tried 16-bit?

Hey chrisd yeah a stepped effect. I also thought about using Substance Painter to do it with just a height map like this…

but the final outcome in Blender is very jagged (and the beveled edges have become a mess) and looks low quality even with a 16 bit, 8k, png height map on a 3.5mil face model that is uv unwrapped correctly.

See here…

Not sure what’s going on? Any insights?

That stepped or alias effect is hard to eliminate, and is based on the resolution of the mesh. If you already have the resolution cranked up and its very noticeable at the scale you want to view it at, doubling the resolution and decimating it might help. Test it an a small area first before you do the whole object. A lot of apps that do displacement don’t have adaptive subdivision, so this seems to be one of the only options. Unfortunately you will get triangles as a result. I admit I have not tried this in Blender.

I just remembered something else I tried … Instant Meshes. I have has issue with high polycounts previously, but the new version from July seems a bit more stable. You could try it with the object you have now before doubling the resolution.