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I'm trying to model a conquistador helmet for a game. But I ran into a problem since I am quite new to blender. My model is too smooth, I would like it to have a dented surface (see picture below).

My render on the left, wanted effect on the right (My render on the left, wanted effect on the right)

I have tried to mess around with displacement and a image texture, but I could not find a imagine with the wanted effect. Is there another type of texture I could use or perhaps another method?

enter image description here (My attempt to add displacement marked in red)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

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  • $\begingroup$ have you tried switching the surface material from diffuse to glossy? $\endgroup$
    – eromod
    May 3, 2016 at 22:34

2 Answers 2

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First of all you should mime the glossiness of the two helmets. By examining the spreading of light near the highlites you can notice how the object on the right has sharper reflections.

enter image description here

Build a simple material based on a glossy shader with low roughness lit by a nice HDRI iage.

enter image description here

In order to get make the object less smooth we should deform its surfaces. This can be done "physically" by sculpting ridge and vallys or "faked" by altering the normal vector of the faces for example by plugging a noise texture with appropriate scale in a bump node and then in the normal socket of the shader (or wih the displace method as you already introduced).

enter image description here

Each face reflects light toward the camera based on its orientation. If you bend the face's normals, they will start to reflect light the way it would look if the surface was truly deformed. By examining the edges, a viewerwill probably be able to discover the trick, but at a first glance should look good enough amd will help to kee your polycount low.

enter image description here

A second thing to notice is that the object on the right has some little scratches that yours is missing. One of the possible way to reproduce a similar effect could be to use a texture to drive the roughness of the smooth shader.

You could have used the displace/normal method also in this case: they are some kind of surface deformations too, but as the effects has a very small scale I find taking advantage of roughness variation more appropriate.

enter image description here

Final step is to balance the two effect in order to get the wanted result.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Wow this looks very promising, will definitely try it out. thanks $\endgroup$
    – Isak
    May 3, 2016 at 23:06
  • $\begingroup$ To be honest is more or less what you already did; I just tried to breakdown the main aspects of the problem, what affect what, hoping to make easier the tweaking of the parameters. $\endgroup$
    – Carlo
    May 3, 2016 at 23:10
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The helmet on the right image has a lot less roughness. I think your setup looks good but play a bit more with the values for the math node and roughness for the glossy shaders

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Nice, will give it a shot. $\endgroup$
    – Isak
    May 3, 2016 at 23:14

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