I was wondering if it were possible to create some sort of heat/location map based on vertex location using vertex paint? If there is a way already, how do I go about finding that information out?
An example I am referring to is say I make a sculpture of damage on a car door, and I need to see two different colors based on the indentation of the scratch/dent. The door is green, but the scratch is red. And all of this has to be in vertex paint. Without manually painting it myself, is there a way to make Blender figure out this difference?
I guess what you need is a cavity map.
In Blender you can use a Geometry node and with the Pointness you’ll get close to a cavity map (you might need to increase the contrast of the Pointness with a ramp or a map range node).
I think there’s also the ambient occlusion method, but I didn’t use it much so I can’t remember exactly the workflow.
If you use exclusively Cycles then you can try a bevel node as well.
Lastly, if the scratches are affecting the door overall and are not isolated to along the edges, then you can simply mix two maps with a noise map, a ramp, another texture, etc.
This all sounds good, but I don’t understand any of it. Is this all possible in vertex paint? You can use textures in vertex paint? Also, do I have to have UVs to do that? The car can’t really have UVs because of the way it was modeled.
So, about the vertex paint. You can use vertex paint to paint the part of the door you want to affect with the scratches if that’s what you’re looking for.
Basically, you create a material, you add a vertex color node and you connect it to the color input or to a viewer node. Then you pick a shade of grey and you start painting on the model. Lastly, you can use this vertex color information to mask the part you want to keep clean and the part you want to look scratchy.
If you don’t need a particular area but just an overall feeling of scratches across the surface, you can simply use a roughness map.
I’m copying a black vertex color layer (from any arbitrary mesh) onto a white vertex color layer, modulated by a vertex group that I’ve set up with a vertex weight proximity modifier.
@Andrew_Ray wow thanks for all the tutorials and tips! I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to do is so complicated, and I don’t know if I want to get into nodes. But, seeing as most textures/materials are run by nodes, there’s probably no way to avoid them. I will look at your tutorials, but it’s all way over my head currently.
Below, this is kind of just what I want to happen. I’ve put an example scratch on the surface using sculpting, and I was wondering how to make it show up highlighted in a different color in vertex paint mode. I manually painted on the scratch, so that’s how that’s happening. My work wants me to find a way to make this happen on all the sculpts I make, so it would have to be something that can be copied and pasted. There will probably be renders of it later. I think @bandages might be on to something, so I’ll look into that image. But I’m not very good on the texturing side of Blender, I’m a modeler (and my work doesn’t require me to learn texturing, so I want to make this easy lol)
