Random Modular Textures Tutorial

Big thanks to my March 2021 Patrons for supporting me in making this! Please continue supporting me on Patreon!

This is also posted as a thread on BlenderArtists.

What do you do when you need a lot of something, but with slightly different textures? When I was making my Reimu project, I was considering doing a scene where she is throwing her charm cards all over the place (a common theme in Touhou art.) So I built a setup that would let me make any number of charms, but keep variety in their textures and colors. I only ended up using a few of them in the test pose I covered in my overview video of that project, but I got a lot of questions about how the setup was done.

I cleaned up and optimized my previous setup for my March 2021 Tier 2 Patron reward. Here’s a video that will teach you how it all works! The education file is available on Gumroad($), or you can follow along with the video to build it yourself.

Each duplicate of the object has a different selection of 3 random Symbols (from a sheet of 9), one Border (of 6), and random colors. The node setup splits the image into tiles and gets a random tile by manipulating the UV coordinates. There are several core node groups that can be reused, and example groups built around them that are specific to Reimu’s Charms.

Showing some parameters of the setup.

The Symbols texture.

The Borders texture.