Chinese Coin Pile Material

Inspiration

In January 2024, my professor issued a challenge to his students to make some type of art with the theme "Year of the Dragon". While I started with some dragon scales I found them fairly easy and I decided to push myself by making a coin pile material.

What it does

This PBR material can be used on any 3D model in Unreal, Blender, Unity, etc to simulate stacked coins with accurate normals, roughness, color, etc.

How we built it

Due to issues with height scattering in Substance leading to clipping, I opted to design the height map in Blender by running a rigid-body simulation using coins I modeled, bringing them into Photoshop to make them seamless, and working from there in Substance to do all the other details like the color and roughness.

Built With

• blender
• nodes
• photoshop
• substance-designer