Blender. How to add graininess to the texture?

[Tattooshop]

Hello! When I bake the AO map in a Blender, my model is too white and uniform, like a plain white sheet of paper. How can I add a slight graininess to the texture all over the model without changing the shadows to make it look more natural?

I am still on Blender 2.79 and use Blender Render to bake AO.

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

3 hours ago, Tattooshop said:

Hello! When I bake the AO map in a Blender, my model is too white and uniform, like a plain white sheet of paper. How can I add a slight graininess to the texture all over the model without changing the shadows to make it look more natural?

I am still on Blender 2.79 and use Blender Render to bake AO.

 

Mix a little bit of generated noisy texture like Musgrave or Stucci into your diffuse. (Don't use Noise for this in 2.79 -- it doesn't scale and is always pixel-size noise in that version.) You'll have to play around with scale, color and mixing modes to get a good look.

 

[Tattooshop]

10 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Mix a little bit of generated noisy texture like Musgrave or Stucci into your diffuse. (Don't use Noise for this in 2.79 -- it doesn't scale and is always pixel-size noise in that version.) You'll have to play around with scale, color and mixing modes to get a good look.

 

Hello! Thanks for the reply! Could you please explain a little more about the chain of nodes? What have I missed?

 

[Tattooshop]

Ok, I think I found how to add this node and the effect is clearly visible in the Cycles render, but when I switch to Blender render to bake the texture, the effect disappears and the texture is white again. Is it possible to do this in Blender render?

Edited November 10, 2020 by Tattooshop

[Chic Aeon]

I don't think so which is why I didn't respond before, but I bet @Aquila Kytori knows that answer.  :D.   You CAN bake just an AO map in Cycles render though. It has a different (in my tests "softer") look.  Not sure if that will get you what you are aiming for or if it will work as except for a test making an AO map I always baked a full render.  

A similar effect would be to take the plain AO map in Blender Render and then adding the "noise" in with a layering blend in your graphics program.  

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

6 hours ago, Tattooshop said:

Hello! Thanks for the reply! Could you please explain a little more about the chain of nodes? What have I missed?

Blender Render doesn't use nodes. Those are just for Cycles (and Eevee, in later versions.) You have to set up textures and texture blending entirely differently, and I'm really not familiar with the old way anymore.

You shouldn't be trying to put graininess into the AO, in my opinion. You should add it to your diffuse texture, which will require either a separate bake (if you're using Blender to combine them) or an outside image editing tool . Your AO bake is created out of nothing based purely on your model's geometry -- there is no step where you can add graininess to it beforehand (other than modeling thousands of tiny nicks into your mesh, which would be silly). If you are going to modify your AO map at all, you have to do it afterward.