Creating realistic mud splattering?

[stage-gr]

i can only think of using photos of actual mud spatters.... doing it by hand sounds like time consuming and i doubt you'll get that REAL look...

actually if someone else knows how to do this from scratch i would be interested to know too :)

[Stefan-Morrell]

I'd also be curious to hear how others do this

off hand the only thing I can think of is taking a photo of real mud splatter & going from there,
you could even use some splatter images from cgtextures.com as a starting point

the high speed & wedge sections look to be the one:

http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=10246

http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=10652

[soulburn3d]

I'd recommend taking real photos. But no need to do a real car (unless you want to, sounds like fun!). Trying to extract real mud from a shiny car sounds like a pain though. Instead, I'd get some white paper, get some black ink, maybe dilute it with a little water, than splash the liquid on the paper. You can experiment with different methods, for example, maybe take a big paint brush, one of those 2-3 inches across brushes made for painting walls, dip it into the liquid, then flicking it at your paper. When you find something that starts looking right, duplicate the process on maybe 6 pieces of paper, wait for the ink to dry, scan them in, and layer them in photoshop to get your final look. That will also force you to get away from the computer for part of the process, which may be a much needed break from the digital world :)

- Neil

[CKPinson]

I'd probably use a combo of particles and sculpting- (displacement or Normal).

[Rafaelsanson]

I guess you'll have to observe really closely to the way it comes out of the wheel, but what I always do and looks very fine is paint them in photoshop. Create a new file in photoshop with about 200 X 200 pixels. In there paint a diagonal line of ponits followed by another with a shorter radius, both align in diagonal angle. Then save the brush and use it in photoshop whith medium spacing (brushes--brush tipe shape ), turning on your shape dynamics (also inside brushes) and move to maximum the angle jitter. Finally star to paint. Try to pass several times a place you want to mud more and change constantly the size of the brush in inverse proportion to the distan of the source of the mud in stright lines. Do not and never use blur or any kind of smoothens cause you will lose the effect you are looking for. I hope this serve you well, like many things in CG you'll need some practice to obtain the results you want.

[mister3d]

The only way for you is to buy an expensive sports car(not lower than 100,000) and drive in the mud, then using laser technology scan it with a milimeter accuracy.. But seriously, there are 2 disks of total textures(5 and 8): the 5-th has many dirt masks and the 8-th has exactly what you need, it's all about cars and has some dirt masks for this case.
I painted this from scratch in 10 minutes using your photo as a visual reference without masking. Hey, sometimes it's fun to paint by hand, without ready textures. But sometimes this fun is not affordable. Using smudge is a mistake, it will never give you sharpness. I used just a scattering brush with care. http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/4507/asdasdasdasdasdmx7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/4507/asdasdasdasdasdmx7.9bcf293046.jpg (http://g.imageshack.us/g.php?h=522&i=asdasdasdasdasdmx7.jpg)

When it was photoshop 7 and lower, using it's brushes was not very comfortable for me (maybe I just missed something), but with these nice scattering functions it's really easy to create dirt, at least if you don't want something special. I don't know, I think use both photoshop and dirt masks for your own taste. Using only dirt masks can be longer and not always needed. Just my opinion.

[U-238]

Thanks for the replies so far eveyone. :)

mister3d: Wow, that looks really great! Did you use a wacom when you painted that? (just asking because I don't have one)

soulburn3d: That's an idea I thought of after seeing the textures from cgtextures. (Thanks Stefan! I didn't notice they had splatters. :D) It'd definitelly be workable. Maybe a little messy, but workable. :p

Rafaelsanson: Not sure I get what you mean 100%. You mean to, basically, create a point based splatter brush?

[mister3d]

Did you use a wacom when you painted that? (just asking because I don't have one)


Yes, you need something like wacom, not necessary wacom, but it would be the best choice if you are serious about texturing.

[Aetherea]

Wacom Graphire (or better, Intuous) is the perferct solution. Maybe also other tablets, like Trust can help you... but I have a Wacom Graphire and I love it for all, painting and texturing :)

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