Micro-Dust Material Tutorial

Hello,

I tried to get micro dust on my lighter geometry. I used Poliigon's 3K dust texture as reference. Then created my 3d dusts with vector Magic and Modo, painted them with Substance Painter and finally get the capture from Marmoset Viewer.

Hope you like the result and explanation.

I have used my lighter model to use these dusts on which can be accessed by:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/544aW

Realtime capture of the dusty material I get

This is the photo reference of the dust I want to get

This is the reference image that I used to get my 3d dusts. It can be obtained from http://www.poliigon.com

This is the vectorized image (.eps format) gathered with Vector Magic software. http://vectormagic.com

Modo imports .eps files as curves. We need curves to use them as 3d dust tubes.

We have 2d dust curves but they need depth. So I use push tool from sculpt tools of modo. I use a noise map to push some of the vertices of the curves.

This noise map which is used as image ink helps us to get 3d dusts with "one push".

3d curves are shown in this image. You can also use image falloff with push instead of using image ink. We are ready to use them as randomly choosen mesh paint items.

You can see my mesh paint settings. Before we do that, don't forget to split all connected curves as seperate mesh items. It can be done by right clicking to mesh and select unmerge mesh.

After mesh painting these curves on a planar surface, we can render this 3d curves as tubes. It can be done by clicking render curves as polygons on "curve settings". This dust can be more advanced if you use gradient noise for radius gradient... *Sob* :(

Rendering normal maps and alpha maps from directed camera with 16k resolution. I have used geometric normal output for this.

You can see the normals of the 3d dust tubes. Now you can use them on Substance painter to get dust normals with non uniform depth.

Result