MARI: Distressed edges of bricks in bump map

You are working on a brick wall.

All the bricks are individually modelled. Lovely.

VFX Supervisor then decides that he wants all the edges of all the bricks all worn, torn and distressed in the bump map. Sells the illusion, it does. Takes a year to go over every single brick painting it in, it does.

Here is what you do:

Grab a few good rock textures from Texture Pilot or the like. Bring them into MARI's image manager and desaturate the texture images (Filters - Hue). Crank up the contrast a bit, adjusting the levels for example (Filters - Levels):

Add a new layer to your Bump map channel and set it to multiply blend mode.

Select MARI's Paint Through tool, using your greyscale rock texture and pick a brush, with reasonably soft edges, like Linear.

Now, using the Paint Through tool, you can quickly trace the edges of the bricks with the rock texture, which gives lovely organic and believable cracked edges on your bump map.

As quickly as you can trace the edges (use the structure of the wall to bundle your tasks together, so you work all the horizontal lines first and then vertical lines, for example) you'll go from this:

... to this:

Job done!


Did you find this useful? Leave me a comment, share the post via your favourite social media or drop me an email about things you'd like to see covered.