Weathering & Grime in 3D Environments

Deep dive on how textures weather in real life, and some techniques for doing it on game environments.

Learning to do weathering properly in environment art will take your work to much higher levels. It's one of the best ways to add style, believability, and visual harmony to a level. It's what makes things look grounded. However, weathering is a very complicated process, probably beyond our comprehension since it's the result of a huge amount of factors (weather, temperature, humidity, location, pollution, sun intensity, human interactions etc...). To become a great environment artist, one needs to understand at some level how weathering works. 

In this video, I study some pictures I took in Kraków, and break down what we can learn from them. 

I then show several examples of weathering in different games and finish by showing how I approached weathering on the Spanish Town VR. 

Grab a tea or coffee, sit back, and enjoy these beautiful degraded buildings with me :)