Making a flat-colored wall (no texture) not bland

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi everyone,

Please see the screenshot below.

helpBlenderLowPolyBland
helpBlenderLowPolyBland1402×807 772 KB

I am experimenting with going from textured environments (see remains at e.g. 5) to flat colors.

I think the main problem is wherever large same-color surfaces appear. To fight that I already did

  • displace surface to get shading from light (3)
  • make edges round’ish (2; although I do not understand why it works. To be clear the hover truck is flat-colored.)
  • add some color variations (4)

But what to do with the walls or the fence (1). They do not look nice, right? They look “bland” and boring. But how to break that? Can it be broken? Or do I have to use textures here?

Best wishes
Joe

2

Maybe you can use a brick texture node for the walls, which blender includes

3

Thanks @wrenchblender for the idea. I played with it a bit. It does not look too bad if I plug in the brick texture into the normal channel. Then lower strength somewhat to make it more subtle.

4

Use a bump,node and maybe for the fences use a wireframe modifier, maybe you can just use the displacement and bump textures of an image texture

5