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The latest addition to my railroad needs long sheets of diamond pattern steel plate. I wanted these plates to look well used, slightly rusty and to have varying amounts of dried dirt on them. I wasn't looking forward to building the material because while it's relatively easy to build show-room new surface finishes, I had never been happy with any of my attempts at old steel and procedural dirt looked too much like soft edged clouds. I thought the only way I could get hard edged dirt would be a decal. However after much experimentation I've got a material that's more than adequate. At this distance it's fairly convincing. The diamond pattern is a tiled normal decal. And it almost holds up at arm's length. The best part is that since it's procedural you can have a lot of dirt. Or just a few random patches. The materials (one for colours and one for textures) use a combination of native A:M and Enhance:AM combiners. If anyone's interested, I can post a schematic of the materials showing how they work.

Back working with Dylan Perry, formerly of Momentum Animations, Now Perry Animations on some videos he's working on, thanks to Jason we got AM running again, tell you what after a brea from AM for so long it was refreshing to dive in again and relearn some things, hopefully I can now seriously get back into it again and pic up on some projects that have been sitting on the shelf for a while The old Mac pro that I had, turned it into my 3D rig, not too shabby for an almost vintage computer, runs windows and AM awesome