Hey everyone, it’s been a long time, and I’ve been missing interacting with this community. I’ve had so much going on recently. College has been taking a lot of my time. However, I’m still working on creative projects whenever I can. These last few months, my main projects haven’t been blender related though. I’ve been trying a lot of new things, including laser cutting and electronics projects. I’m also (slowly) trying to get better at traditional art.
These last few days, I’ve been getting back into 3d sculpting. I’d like to work on 3d printing a bit more and try creating some tabletop miniatures. The other day, when I was looking at different brush alphas and textures, I had an interesting idea: what if I were to hand draw my textures (on a physical piece of paper) then use them to create sculpting brushes? This morning, I tried it out, and the results were pretty cool, so I thought I would share them here!
Final Result
My Process
Even though I was drawing and shading by hand, I found it easier to imagine I was creating a procedural texture. So my process was very similar to the process I use to make a shader.
First of all, I made a simple voronoi by scattering points and drawing cells around them.
Then I used a black pen to thicken the cells. I made sure to add a little bit of extra thickness around the intersections to round off the corners of each rock.
Next, I added some shading to each rock to bevel the edges.
Finally, I added more wear and tear to each rock, like scratches and cracks.
After this, I took a photo and imported it into affinity photo to adjust the levels and contrast. The goal was for my brightest areas to be completely white, and my darkest areas to be completely black.
Initially, I did encounter a lot of noise which made for a messy displacement map in blender, but mitigated this by doing a few iterations of blurring and sharpening. Unfortunately, this resulted in some loss of details. This was fine for my proof of concept, but in the future, I’d like to learn how to mitigate these issues. If you have any ideas, let me know!
Final Thoughts
Honestly, this was just a fun little proof of concept, but I think it has some interesting potential in the future. I’d love to eventually improve this style and use it on a finished project in the future. It would be fun to make a couple pages of these textures based on different materials like wood, metal, and cloth. In addition, it would be really cool to do texture painting with this technique, You could print out a uv map, physically paint over them, then take a photo and use it as the texture.
What do you think?
maybe this is the sign I’ve been waiting for! 
Cool technique! 
