Procedural Tactile Paving

Support Materials and Textures
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#1

Hey,

I’ve started to create procedural materials in Blender using the Shader Editor and was trying my hand at Tactile Paving. I’m fairly new and ran into some problems:

  • The mesh isn’t displaced by the dispacement map. It just move straight up and i can’t figure out what i’m doing wrong.

  • I would like to add dirt especially around the bottom of the knobs. what is the best way to start this?

#2

Looking good so far :slight_smile:

To use the displacement, make sure your mesh is dense enough. I assume that the plane seems to be floating is because either

  1. the geometry not being dense enough (the displacement can only displace the geometry that is there) and/or
  2. the scale of your displacement being off. Blender uses meter, so the displacement difference between a black pixel and a white pixel will be 1 m. Change the values of your displacement map to fit blenders unit (by simply multiplying them) or use the scale slider on the displacement node to adjust this to your needs.

To add dirt around your knobs you could try the following:
You probably have some form of distance function that you’re using to create the knobs (left). If you can remap those to create a mask around the desired areas (middle) and add a noise texture to introduce irregularities (right):

distance-to-mask
distance-to-mask1980×660 165 KB

tactile_pavement_ba
tactile_pavement_ba1576×974 241 KB

tactile_pavement_BA.blend (2.0 MB)

This is from a similar texture I made once and I adapted it to use displacement like in your example. Check out the blend file if this seems like it would be useful to you. You’ll probably find out ways to adapt something similar to your setup!

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