100 MultiPurpose Imperfection — VOL 04

Volume 04 of the imperfection series is 100 tileable maps of real surface wear, photographed rather than generated in a noise graph. It is for the texture artist who already has a clean base material and needs the layer that goes over the top of it — the grime, the handling, the uneven polish that stops a surface reading as freshly manufactured.

What you get

• ✓100 tileable multipurpose imperfection maps
• ✓Every map at 4K resolution, 4096 x 4096, in PNG
• ✓A preview render of each map, so you can find one without loading it
• ✓Captured from real-world surfaces rather than built procedurally
• ✓Prepared for the metal/roughness workflow

The set is called multipurpose because none of the maps is committed to a single channel. Loaded into the stencil slot in Substance Painter they mask a dirt or a grunge layer through real photographic edges; dropped into the roughness input of a fill layer they break up the flat, even specular response that makes an untouched material look like a preview sphere. ZBrush reads the same files as alphas. In Substance Designer a levels node and a blur turn one of them into the base of a generator you can reuse across a whole project.

One note before you start: the maps are authored for the metal/roughness workflow. On a specular/glossiness pipeline they have to be inverted first — an invert node in Designer, an inverted adjustment layer in Photoshop — or the worn areas will read as polished and the polished areas as worn.

The pack was photographed and assembled with Mirage3Dart, and it is the fourth library in a run that began with roughness in VOL 01 and moved through stencils and wood.