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It's a 7 minute video, but the basic node setup only takes a few seconds. Very simple, and a surprisingly effective way to add some cohesion/age to a scene! Personally I think it works best when you leave it subtle, but I cranked it pretty high for visibility purposes. You COULD mix in a different texture into the mix factor, too, like fingerprints or whatnot, or into the color channel of the diffuse texture, with larger 'clumps"- but this'll work for me as-is in most cases. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back and re-render a few Dynamo shots to be a bit more dusty. 

Files

Quickly Add Dust to Objects in Blender

Comments

Carter Burr-Kirven

Fun for snow and sand and moss, too! I even tried some displacement stuff once to get the snow to "pile up" on top of the objects. I imagine you already know this, but just in case, or if anyone down here in the comments wants to know, you can also use object-space normals instead of world-space normals if you do want the dust stuck to the surface! The Normal input from Texture Coordinates is object-space, and you can also do a Vector Transform on normals from anywhere else to get them into object space—there's like 5 or 6 places you can get normals in the shader editor.

IanHubert

Ah yeah thanks for the tip! I've always been scared of displacements, because I'm always a bit afraid of all the new geometry it adds, but I think I'm missing out on some really cool tools because of that.

Carter Burr-Kirven

I do love adaptive subdiv for stuff like bricks or rocky/gravelly grounds—sometimes I feel like having real geometry down there at that pixel level helps to get that final kiss of detail—but yeah I've definitely barely skimmed that abyss. Every Nodevember we see all these nuts creating entire schools of fish or animated robots by displacing cubes, and I end up unsure if I'm inspired or concerned...

IanHubert

OH JEEZ yeah that Nodevember stuff was ABSOLUTELY unbelievable! From a production standpoint, though, usually I have render times of just a couple minutes, but whenever I start playing with displacement stuff it seems to take that long just to pre-process? There are probably lots of ways to optimize I don't know about.

Petteri Valtiala

This is nice! Also thanks for those node group tricks, I haven't really used them for...anything yet, but this macro control stuff def makes me see the usefulness more.

Carter Burr-Kirven

Oh, yeah, for sure. I definitely notice a render time hit with displacements, but not usually too severe? Then again, I have yet to use more than a handful of displaced objects in one scene... Plus, I generally kind of write off my render times as "always pretty bad..." I can't do GPU renders (thanks apple), so I guess I just sort of always expect a decent-quality render to be like 10+ minutes

IanHubert

They're really useful! You can also append any groups you come up with into other projects, if you want (though I never remember to do that- I always seem to make the same node groups from scratch over and over :P )

Karribu

Ian, unrelated question but I have to know. Is dynamo dream connected to the dynamo series you've been doing so far? And when is it likely to be released?

akbar

WOOAWWWW

Ikem Smith

Thanks Ian! This is really useful.

bpype

Ian, could you please do compositing tutorial in the future? I really like your film looks

Paul Spooner

Your control system works, but wouldn't it be simpler to use a "multiply" on the factor?

matthew sama

Yes, would love to see some of the render-post workflow.

IanHubert

Ooo- if you're recommending it, I suspect it would be!

IanHubert

Yeah! I've talked about it a bit, but I should do one more in-detail. That said, compositing can cover a lot of different stuff; is there anything specifically you're curious about?

Greg Beaudry

Yes! Do you do any color balancing or use and special LUTs? Would that be more of a Premier thing rather than a blender thing?

shonal bose

Ian worldbuilding and kitbashing and final comp ......would love to see.....

Sady Fofana

The dust on the lens nearly killed me😫

Erich Stenzel

Looks like you're going to have to a video tutorial about this, Carter!

Mike Duncan

Not sure if it's considered sacrilege but... Octane seems to handle complex displacements in Blender pretty well

Mike Duncan

Thanks as usual Ian, this tut is the first time I've actually began to understand how normals work!

Dan

Yeah this feels like a thing I have the least experience in.

Kai Christensen

Hey, Ian! I spent a couple weeks working on a 1-minute short film with a big VFX shot at the end. Used everything you've taught me here over the past six months. Just wanted to say thank you so much, you've really opened up a whole world of filmmaking possibilities for me! I eagerly anticipate making my next short now :) If you feel like it, I'd love to hear what you think: https://youtu.be/1HA8dbROeJM

IanHubert

Oh hey! That's VERY cool!! Thanks for sharing that!!

IanHubert

AH! Kai! That's so cool! I love all the setup (and the vertical format :D) Was the camera actually moving in the final shot, or was that a post-move? It looks great!!

Kai Christensen

It was a post move, the camera was locked down because my greenscreen room is too small to move the camera around much lol. Thanks for taking the time to watch it, I really appreciate the feedback!

Heru Odyssey

I think I found what I was looking for.

aRANDOM

Thank you Ian! You are a great inspiration. And your videos are so fun to watch, that focussing, and thus learning is easier.

Geoff T

I'd love to see some lens emulation post workflow such as accurately doing lens imperfections like in the fringing/distortion or anamorphic etc.