It's not a subtle or as evenly spread as I was thinking. It's just added some black and white blotches to the surface.
What I had in mind was this:
Get yourself some nice natural textures. Nature does this stuff far better than any algorythm ever will.
Here are some samples of the sort of thing I'm thinking of:
I've got dozens and dozens and dozens of these things so if you want any, let me know and I can e-mail some of the better ones. The ones I use tend to be thousands of pixels square too.
Try to avoid using Blinn or Phong shaders too. They're one of the biggest culprits for making something look plasticky. I tend to use Oren-Nayar Blinn which has a diffused, matt finish to it and can look more convincing on larger objects.
Blinn is on the left. Oren-Nayar Blinn is on the right:
I take my noise texture and if I'm using it for a texture effect rather than colour, I'll grey-scale it like so:
The result is a perfectly flat colour but with a noisy surface. Like so:
What this means is that yes you have a perfectly even green finish with no black and white blotches - giving it that just out of the shipyard look but the natural specular noise and the use of a non-blinn shader means it also doesn't look like it's made of statically charged vinyl. Another old trick is to slightly lighten or darken the specular map for each individual panel on the hull too. It adds more interest and also makes it look like it really is a seperate piece of the hull.
Crow
