With more and more artists moving towards using software such as Substance to create their shaders with a combination of procedurals and hand painting, it can feel quite daunting as a new artist to try to learn another piece of complex software at the same time as trying to learn Maya. This tutorial will show you the workflow to be able to add some simple, yet effective procedural edge wear or dirt to add to your shaders using just Autodesk Maya and its built-in render engine Arnold.
Procedural textures like fractals and noise are calculated using mathematical equations and so are quick and easy for artists to create and edit in Maya. This tutorial will use procedural textures and combine them with the Arnold render engine’s aiCurvature node to create edge wear and dirt. The setup is fairly quick and once you understand the workflow, you can then take that knowledge and experiment with slightly different setups using the aiCurvature node to create a range of materials, from worn metals to chipped wood. The final result will bring subtle worn details to your textures that you would otherwise have had to hand paint in a different software, allowing you to concentrate on mastering Maya and save learning a specialist texture software for another time.