Staining your textures with Vertex colors

On January 10, 2008, in Tutorials, by Admin

Step one for this sample is to add a 32×32 Grid to your scene

Press your space bar, select Add, Mesh and Grid

Just keep the default dimensions of 32×32 and click OK.

I stretched mine out a bit in the “X” direction to match up better with the texture
I’ll be using.

Switch to your Material controls and click on “Add New” to add a new material for this
object.

Go over to the “Texture” tab and click on “Add New”.

I just left all of the default settings as they were for now.

Switch to the Texture controls by clicking the little Leopard Skin Icon and go to the
“Texture Type” selection bar.

Select “Image” for the type from this menu.

Next, under the “Image” tab, Click the “Load” button and locate the image you wish
to use for this project.

After finding your image, click on it and then click the “Select Image” button.

I selected a brick patter for this project and left all of these settings at their
default settings.

Switch over to “Vertex Paint”

Your model will now display the current vertex color for each vertex. I’m going to
reset them all to white and then do some of my own coloring.

Under the “Paint” Tab, if the color is not currently set to White, click on it and locate white from the color selection window. Once white is selected, click on the “Set VertC” button to reset all of the vertices to white.

Now, I’m going to change to a blue color and start painting something. Adjusting the Opacity slider will determine how fast the color is painted (changed). Adjusting the Size slider will adjust the size of your paint brush.

Here is the result of my painting that I want to add to my brick wall. If we created a render now, we would not be able to see our painting. We need to make a couple more changes.

Going back to Material Mode (F5). Under the “Material” tab, click on the
“VCol Pai” button. This will add the Vertex Painting to our material. Under the “Map To” tab, switching the setting from “Mix” to “Multiply” will give the best results in my opinion. You can try the other settings here to see the affect they will have on your texture.

Here is the rendered result of my brick texture multiplied with my vertex painting.

Different techniques can give you some different results. An increasing green color down the wall can suggest moss or algae increasing the closer it gets to the ground.