In this episode, we're going to venture away from our camera reference a little and look at how we can create some wear and tear within our textures to achieve a slightly more realistic aged look with our camera.
If we look at some other photo references, we can easily see areas on the metal sticker and plastic have scratched or worn away.
You can also sometimes spot dust that is settled in the crevices of the camera.
So today we'll begin to achieve this look using Procedural layers, a bit of manual projection painting using the Paint Through tool, and introduce another feature in Mari in part 2 of this section: Ambient Occlusion.
Ambient Occlusion is a method of mimicking soft shadows produced by natural ambient light.
But it can also be used to isolate crevices within our objects, which can then be used to simulate dust that often settles in those crevices.
Creating these masks is also going to produce variation across our objects to make it look more lived and realistic.
Let's take a look at creating wear and tear on the metal and stickers.
We can approach creating wear on the metal by utilizing layer masks to create different layers of breakup.
First let's identify the Color layer for the metal parts.
I do this by opening the "Layers" palette and hiding and unhiding the layers to check which part of our colors in the viewport get hidden.
I think we should create a Group layer to add all of our lens metal texture layers into so we can tidy up our layer palette a bit and start to isolate our textures into their own groups.
Select the Color layer we created for our metal, and click the "Group Layer" button.
Let's rename this group to lens metal or something similar.
It's a good idea to keep in mind that towards the end of your project you're going to have a lot of layers.
So always make sure you name them and group the layers appropriately, especially if you're going to be collaborating on texture projects with other artists.
So let's also rename our color layers to be something more recognizable.
To create the scratches on our metal surfaces we're going to use projection painting.
We'll use the Paint Through tool and a layer mask so that when we paint with the Paint Through tool, all the scratches we paint will reveal the layer below.
So in fact, we first need a layer that the scratches will reveal.
If we take a look at reference imagery, scratches often reveal lighter less worn material, so we should create a color layer that uses a lighter metallic color than the layer above it.
Create a new "Color" procedural layer in our lens metal group and name it "Lens metal lighter color".
Click the "Color" panel in the procedural layer, and let's start by approximating the metal color above.
Then raising the value slider of this color towards the lighter end of the spectrum so we end up with something like this.
You can also open the "Colors" palette and along the left side you'll see the six most recent color swatches you used if you want to check the values for any recently used colors that you might want to reuse again.
We can review these colors against our reference later and adjust them if needed.
Then we want to make sure this layer masks off the rest of the object and only appears for the lens metal areas.
So let's go into our "Selection Group" palette, select the metallic lens group.
Head back to the "Layers" palette and right-click the "Lighter lens metal color" layer.
Go to "Layer Mask" > "Add Mask" > "From Selection".
Now we have our two layers: our top layer and our bottom layer.
To demonstrate how this mask is going to work, I'm going to select the top metal layer.
When your layer has a mask present, this icon appears.
When the mask is active it will appear bright orange.
I'm going to make sure the mask is active and activate my Paint tool with the P key and choose white from the color swatch picker.
As you can see, when I start painting nothing is happening.
Let's change the color of my paint to black.
When I start painting with black, the top layer color is removed to reveal the lighter color underneath.
Painting with white reveals nothing.
It's going to retain the current layer.
If I press the I key, it brings up all of our available targets and layers.
This is a really quick way to switch between painting different layers and channels by the way, but in this case I just want to show you what this layer mask looks like.
If I select the "Current Paint Target" in the "Shaders" column, which is our layer mask as indicated by the orange icon, you can see the mask is being displayed in the viewport.
The white areas are where our top layer are shown and the black areas is where our bottom layer are shown.
If I pick a grayscale color from the middle of the spectrum it's going to produce a blend between the two.
What this means is we could load in a grayscale image to project onto our surface as a mask that lets us paint scratches and other wear on to our metal surface.
So let's go ahead and do that.
I can switch back to my regular shader view in the viewport by selecting "Principled BRDF" from the "Shader" column.
Open up the "Image Manager" and load in the scratches image.
We need to enable "Scalar Data" on this image as we don't want the colors in the image to be converted by Mari because we're not actually using color from this image.
We're actually using the raw 0 to 1 values in the image to paint this mask.
0 in the image being fully black and 1 being fully white.
We want all the values in the image to be retained and not be converted in the colorspace conversions.
Please make sure when you import images to be used for masking that you tag them as "Scalar Data" here.
Make sure the top metal layer is selected and the mask is active and activate the Paint Through tool using the U key.
We can also turn on "Auto Bake and Clear" in the "Bake Behavior" properties for this section of the tutorial since it's going to allow us to paint nice and quickly.
Drag the scratches image into the viewport and resize it using CTRL + SHIFT and move it using SHIFT.
Rotate using CTRL.
If you need to see what you're doing a bit better, reduce the viewport image opacity by using SHIFT and - button.
You can project the scratches onto the surface by placing the image over the area you want to scratch up and just paint over it.
Do this for all the lens metal parts to add some nice scratch breakup.
Remember you can check the appearance of your painted mask at any time by hitting I key and selecting "Current Paint Target" from the "Shaders" panel.
You can even paint from here if you need.
And then select "Principled BRDF" when you want to view them through your shader again.
To add some darker metal break over on the lens we can add another new layer on top of the other two layers.
Bring the colour value all the way down so we have a darker metal color.
Right-click the layer go to "Layer "Mask" > "Add Mask", and this time we're going to "Hide All".
This is because we only want to paint on this layer mask to reveal areas of it instead of paint to hide areas.
This time we're just going to paint the break up manually, so hit the P key to activate the paint tool.
In our "Shelf" palette we can select a nice preset brush to use in the "Hard Surface Brushes" tab.
Select a color that's not pure white or pure black to create some nice gradual break up in this metal surface.
You can reset the colors back to pure black and pure white by clicking this button here or pressing D on the keyboard.
And switch between these two colors while painting by pressing X on the keyboard to quickly hide or quickly reveal your layers.
Use the tool help at the bottom of the UI to check the hotkeys for scaling and rotating your active brush.
You can keep going with this as much do you like to really build up the worn away surface of the lens.
All right, now it looks like our lens has experienced some handling, let's move on.
The effects we want to achieve on the sticker is a bit of paper wear on a couple of the corners.
Paper often starts to wear at the very edge and gradually wears inwards over time.
So we can utilize the techniques we just used on the lens for the sticker.
Let's create a new group for our Lubitel sticker.
Let's take a look at some torn sticker references.
They often have varying degrees of noisy opacity towards two clean torn edges.
How do you think we can achieve that in Mari?
Well, we know that our sticker is built up of paper layers and that paper is often a white or off-white.
In order to get that white layer we should copy the Lubitel sticker layer and paste it onto a new layer.
Make sure our new layer goes underneath the existing sticker layer.
We're going to make that layer fully white by adding a "Levels" adjustment to it and sliding the black output all the way up to 1 so there's no black in the image.
Then we'll add a "HSV" adjustment to the same stack and change the "Value Amount" to 0.85, so we're creating a slightly off-white.
Then add a "Color Balance" adjustment in the same stack and push the "Yellow/Blue" highlight to -0.016, just to add a tint of yellow to our white layer.
Instead of using projection painting, this time we can just manually paint in rough torn edges using paint brushes.
Activate the Paint tool using the P key and create a layer mask on our top sticker layer so we can start the inside paper tear.
The "Felt Tip" brush inside the "Basic Brushes" tab of the "Shelf" is going to work for creating some crisp, torn looking edges.
Turn on "All" in the "Project On" setting of the "Painting" palette so we're not limited to selected faces anymore.
Change the color to black using the color picker and then just start stamping down the brush along some of the corners.
Now we've created the inner paper tear let's create the outer tear.
Select the bottom sticker layer we just created and click "Add Layer Mask".
Once the mask is active create some outer paper tears by stamping down the brush along the very edges.
You can change the color to a light gray to create more of a blend between the two layers and it should start to simulate a torn sticker.
Do this as much as you like along the edges of the sticker and make sure to save your work once you're done.
Don't be afraid to play around with different brushes in Mari to achieve the effects you're after.
There are plenty to choose from in the "Shelf" palette that have different shapes and behaviors.
Utilizing them with masks can really produce realistic looking effects.
In the next part we'll use similar techniques using layer masks to create a dust mask with Ambient Occlusion.