Add subtle wear and dirt to your shaders

One of the biggest issues that keeps 3D renders from being truly photorealistic is that surfaces always look too clean and perfect, an issue you see in render after render.

Creating the kind of subtle and realistic dirt and wear that really gives a surface the appearance of reality is both difficult and time-consuming. In real-world surfaces even clean objects will show subtle signs of dirt and wear in the form of smudges and micro-scratches. It is these kinds of surfaces that this material library aims to create: subtly imperfect, and believably lived-in.

Surface imperfections will bring your shaders to life, by adding subtle variations and by breaking up the reflections so that the materials are no longer uniform and perfectly clean. Objects will look like they have been handled and used by real people, and will have the tiny signs of wear and tear that you see everywhere in real-world materials.

Pick up a spoon and look closely: you will see hundreds of micro-scratches that break up the reflections very slightly, and as soon as you have handled the spoon smudges will appear on the metal. Creating this kind of surface detail can be very time-consuming, but by using this material library you can get a head start.

This photo of a spoon shows the typical micro-scratches that you will find on most common surfaces in the real world.

The library focuses on the most common materials: metal, plastic, and wood, but of course these can be adapted to any situation and the materials are designed to be used as starting points to be adapted to your particular needs and your specific projects. By using these materials as springboards for your own variations you will save yourself a lot of time and you will have great texture maps already built-in, leaving you to simply adjust the scale and strength of the textures as needed.

With over 50 materials included the library will give you an extensive range of options. The materials are compatible with Blender’s Asset Manager so you can drag-and-drop them straight onto your models.

So if you want to instantly be able to create more realistic materials, VizPak: Worn will bring your renders up to the next level and save you a huge amount of time and effort.