80 Crack Alpha — VOL 02

A crack is not a line. It is a network that branches, thins out, changes direction where the material changes and stops where something stiffer holds it, which is why hand-painted cracks almost always look drawn. Volume two of the wear-and-tear series gives you 80 real ones as height data — 70 individual crack alphas for stamping, and 10 seamless crack textures for surfaces too large to stamp.

What you get

• 70 crack alphas plus 10 seamless crack textures in PNG, 16-bit
• The same 80 again in TIFF, 16-bit
• The same 80 again as layered PSD, 16-bit
• Every map at 4K
• A preview for each alpha

Getting a natural result

Simulating wear takes time mostly because the first attempt is always too uniform. Working from captured height data shortcuts that: stamp one of the singles across a corner where the stress would actually concentrate, then let a second at lower opacity spread away from it, and the branching is already right because it was right on the surface it came from.

The seamless ten cover the cases where stamping is the wrong tool — a dry riverbed, a cracked plaster wall, a whole road surface. Tile them at the scale of the material and use a curvature or position mask to fade them out where the surface is protected.

Three formats are there for three different places in a pipeline. PNG for anything that reads a texture directly. TIFF where a bake or a compositing step wants it. Layered PSD for when a crack is nearly right and you want to move one branch, shorten another, and flatten it back out before use.

The model shown in the preview images is not included in this product.

Created by Mirage3Dart and Milad Kambari.