Creating a "Space" texture

Tutorials and tips
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When I set about trying to create the “Babylon 5” spaceship for @PirateJC 's Content submissions, I wanted to create lots of “plates” and bumps along the ship’s fuselage but keep the polycount down. So I went looking on YouTube for a way of creating a “plates” texture and came up with this Blender tutorial. I did not end up using it - but it might be helpful to someone :

Procedural Sci-Fi Metal

And here is a simple result showing one of the textures I created with this method :

Simple Spaceship

I set my material up in the Cycles render engine to be able to bake out the texture, adjusted the colours (I was looking for a “Red Dwarf” type result and tweaked a few of the settings of his material setup. I did not use the latter part of the tutorial where the guy uses the “displacement” stuff as I was aiming for low poly, so basically content between 5.30 and 16.30 minutes

After baking out a texture, I took the diffuse texture into Materialize and created a normal texture from the diffuse texture to get the 3D effects.

Hope someone may find it useful.

Stay Safe All, gryff :slight_smile:

4 Likes
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@gryff,

This is really cool! Do you have a GitHub repo (or pg) for the source code?

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@Vortex : I’m not often asked for a PG, as I’m not the best of coders, but this one is quite simple so here it is :

Space Vehicle

Just loads the files and sets the camera and lights.

Stay Safe, gryff :slight_smile:

1 Like
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@gryff Thanks for the PG! I meant for the generation - I was thought it was procedural, but now I’m assuming it was hand generated / made?

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It is procedural inside Blender, and gryff baked the texture before exporting to BJS.

Basically it’s just a voronoi node with a color ramp to clamp values

voronoi
voronoi1162×961 61.6 KB

my blend example: sciencefi-plates.zip (137.3 KB)