Being able to weather textures in 3D Rachel Bellini, Yanir Kleiman, Daniel Cohen-Or upcoming paper for Siggraph 2016, Time-varying Weathering in Texture Space shows a novel approach for automatically adding time-weathered effects to textures. The system looks at patterns in an image using in texture space and creates a temporal proposal for past and future versions of that texture.
This is done algorithmically where the system will create a texture’s past appearance and predict its future appearance. Thing start to get really interesting when the premise is used for layered textures. Wouldn’t it be cool to simply move a slider in your favorite 3D app that will automatically weather your 3D model based on time?
The weathering works within texture space, so there is not any consideration taken by the model the texture sites on. For example, the edges of an object may be more worn that the sides. This is something that Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter accounts for with its unique tools, like being able to weather an object using particles.