Started out as a test for simulation for something else and then seeing how well I could make a coin. I got real familiar with normal maps and their intended usage and power and how to use with bumps. I will never underestimate them again .
Creating the maps became a system. I did not use any photos on the coins as their texture. I used 75% clipart and line drawings that gave me what I needed to flesh out the front and back of the coins. The materials are metal materials with object info randomization giving different images and noise for roughness, bump, diffuse detail, scale, and rotation of each map per coin. Still, the coins are 95% geometry complete with a hint of displacement. Four coins created averaging 50K faces per denomination (to survive zoom scrutiny), then instanced for the simulation. The simulation was literally heads or tails on what I got for the result, so that took a LOT of redos until I was happy with how they fell.
Anyway, the testing looked so good to me I decided to throw it in here. Enjoy!
Here’s all the steps, highlights, tools, and nodes to see how I approached it.
Find accurate or acceptable reference images to create the map channels. I didn’t use any photos unless I was getting some details for the normal or displacement maps. Especially the text. Getting the text from photos was not a good route at all, so I used a combo of good photo for the front and back main image, then found convincing line art for all text.
Normal map was created with a free utility which I thought worked well: Theverat Normalmap Generator
Blender uses GL normal data and that is found in the advanced options and you’ll probably need to invert. Or use any other normal map creator that gets the correct results.
Material reference. I added a scale range as well for more randomization of the bump. Video
For diffuse, it’s just a limited randomization that picks from a range for the noise scale for each coin that’s made. Similar usage for bump and roughness. They all share the same object info node, then mix in the randomize/anti-tiling rotation and scaling mapping per image map.
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