I’ve put together recently a statue for game use to place into a specific location. I want to add to it a texture resembling of an outdoor statue. I looked up some reference images and thought a greenish material might look best (that’s though not written in stone). I tried using an image of such a statue to obtain a texture from (true PBR in the end). Somehow this does not work at all as expected.
So the question here is how I should approach this texture? It has to be a tiling texture so no precise-painted texture uniquely covering the entire model. I’m a bit at a loss why the photo-sourcing attempt failed that hard. Usually the photo-sourcing route work quite well. I guess this kind of material has peculiar pit-falls?
Or would a different material color look better? I’ve seen white and black toned materials too. I got the impression the shape is clearer to see with this color.
This is how it currently looks like. Not what I want.
Hmm, the color looks good (for a corroded bronze), and the bump too, if you go for a simple tiling texture. Some ways to make it more believable, add metallic and some roughness (value maybe around 0.7 - so quite rough). Maybe bake an Ambient Occlusion map if the target system spec allows it.
Well, the first thing that you need to look at is the position of the camera and your choice of lens. Also, make very sure that the scale of the entire scene reflects reality. Your background building, with its wildly sloped “vertical” lines, seems to be leering over the rest of it. Likewise the trees. After deciding on your “1 blender-unit equals such-and-such distance” scale, you need to rationalize everything to it.
Then, again still-avoiding the statue, set an angle for the sun and let this determine the lighting of the building and the trees.
Do these things first, before you start to consider materials and shading for your (very nice) statue.
I forgot to mention something. This is an “In-Game” shot. I’ve been standing there in front of the statue. So there is no framing or camera tuning going on. The only thing I can change is the material and the scale of the material. I can also change the scale of the statue. I have though the impression that if the statue gets taller it looks worse.
EDIT: I can also show the statue at night-time. Then a light-pole shines on it from the side. You can’t see the light-pole from this position though.
Because you mention you will be using PBR, you could already dial up the Metallic value for your statue, then alter the Roughness, so you get closer to the metal you want. Is wat software is this screencap taken?
I’m using real PBR in my game engine so no metal parameter but proper reflectance/roughness. Bronze itself would be reflectance of (0.98,0.815,0.753). So when I get you right then I should shift the corroded parts more towards this reflectance, right? Are statues actually solid of this material or have they inside a core of different material? I would assume it’s solid.
If this is an in-game shot … okay, how about some fill-light bouncing up from the sidewalk?
Otherwise – you know, it pretty much just has to look like “weathered bronze,” and your present treatment is already pretty close. Not sure what to make of that line which seems to be tracing the dragon’s wing … (isn’t that a bug of some kind?) … but otherwise I’m ready to visually accept that this is the stuff that a sculpture might be made of. It’s a surface treatment that I have already seen real-world sculptors use: a bronze sculpture does not have to be “shiny.” (A famous bronze sculpture in a nearby town looks exactly(!) like driftwood.)
