In real life objects will have some amount of edge wear to them. Most things have varying degrees of worn edges. In 3D we can simulate edge wear by using some sort of matte when mixing two or more materials. This way you can easily get areas of paint chips, rust or simple “no material” where the edges of the object are. There are a number of ways that you can create this matte. You can do it manually, or choose to derive the matte from the geometry somehow.
Learn how to procedurally add worn edges to your models in Blender
When speaking about using a derived matte, there are a few ways to accomplish this. Some popular ways are to use surface or vertex normals, ambient occlusion, or a specialized edge shader. If you are working in Blender, you can easily use the geometry node’s “Pointiness” attribute.
Walking through the process, is Juandre Labuschagne, otherwise known as Blender Buzz. The technique is simple and quick to do, and offers some great results. The best part is that you don’t have manually paint in the areas for edge wear.
