Hi, all!
Where could I find a tutorial for creating a texture needed for a camouflaged model (say, a tank)?
Thanks in advance,
Thierry
Here is one I made a long time ago. I might have done things a bit different if I did it now:
It’s basically a texture mixer, but you can plug in four colors.
It’s only based on a simple noise thingie, nothing fancy.
Real camouflage would depend on what kind of pattern you want, this may most likely not be it. But it shows a principle on how to mix things up.
Thanks to you both, but I should have been more specific. I mean something simpler, like this.
Thierry
Attachments
That’s a case of unwrapping the model and getting the paintbrush out. Of all the things you could pick, it’s probably the easiest to replicate if you have some reference images.
What I usually do is create the basic pattern at the right resolution, then bring it into blender. It’s then placed onto the model in the usual way. By setting up a material and putting it into a diffuse slot. I usually set the material to shadeless while painting, so it’s easy to see what I’m working on.
Most of the work should already be done. When you put it onto the model you simply go into texture paint mode and set the strength of the brush to full with no pressure sensitivity. From there you fill in broken or non-continuous parts of the pattern. When you’re happy export it out and combine it with your other maps. Like diffuse, specular or normal maps.
This applies to Cycles or Blender internal. The material set up is the main difference during the creation process.
I don’t know of any specific tutorials on the subject. But any that deal with unwrapping and texture paint would be relevant to you.
If you aren’t going for any specific pattern, you could do the whole job inside Blender.
How much experience do have in those areas?
Noise (low detail, around 0.25?) -> Contrast -> Color Mixer Face (Green/Brown)-> Diffuse Shader Input fresnel mixed with some white Glossy Shader. If glossy roughness is high (guess it should be, camouflage don’t want to be reflective) consider some PBR shader at the end to automate fresnel reduction by roughness. If roughness is not supposed to be detailed I guess going darker than white for glossy would suffice.
Should use object coordinates for uniform scale among the parts, maybe add some random vector based on Object Info/Random to avoid assembled paint job look (turret colors doesn’t “extend” into body, meaning random paint then assembled).
Quick and dirty setup, something like this maybe?:
There are better ways to achieve random offset in true 3D using a rounded noise, but a contrast node alone on random float output might do the trick good enough in this case.
Thanks a lot. How much experience do I have with texturing? Not much, I’m afraid. I had always avoided the thing, in fact, but I think that today I have to go for it 
Thierry
I’d strongly suggest that you study some real world, especially “military,” tutorials on the painting of camoflauge on real objects. The stated purpose of camouflage is to “disrupt the sight-lines and outlines” of an object when it might be encountered in specific situations. (The “digital camouflage” that we see so much these days is strictly for the deserts of [Afghanistan]. It wasn’t used, or useful, in Vietnam or Europe.)
“Cammo” might consist of multiple layers of detail, and it will probably not be “uniformly UV-mapped” around the object. Instead, it will be devised to confuse the eye from a distance, as the observer tries to pick-out the object from the background.
For instance, in this tank, a very distinctive “complex shape” would be the area around the front wheel (and the base of the gun turret), where there are a lot of sharp angles that ought to greatly aid in visual recognition. A “cammo” artist would probably seek to provide a disruptive yet uniform pattern there, and of course would largely-obliterate the “bulls-eye” army logo. But he probably wouldn’t carry that same pattern over the rest of the object. While lines and patterns used in one area might be used in another, they’d probably have an unpredictably-different orientation … running in a different direction. He is both trying to blur the “distinctive recognition features” of the tank, and “hey, that’s a tank!!” in general.
All of which you can easily do with UV-mapping (and one or more textures), just by fiddling with the mapping of those regions on the source-texture surface.
As a test, try putting the source-texture as your backdrop in the Preview window and then spin the sucker around. If the scale of the backdrop is about-the-same as that of the texturing on your model, how distinct are the outlines of this model against the “forest?” (Scale the model down in your viewport, because odds-are that you’d be looking at it “from some distance away …”)
Well, for doing the camo it doesn’t require any artistic talent. If you go the unwrapping route, I was referring to painting out areas that cross seams. The one thing that’s very obvious in a camo pattern is a straight clean line. The idea is to paint it in while completely ignoring the model topology. So that the patterns are as continuous as you can make them, where they should be. That’s what gives it it’s ability to break up the vehicle’s features. As Sundialsvc4 mentioned.
I do a lot of game type models. Some of which need camo. The method I described works well in that situation. If you’re going to be doing something like high quality still renders, then the node setup CarlG posted might serve you better.