Distressed Leather V-Ray Material

Take the completed oiled leather material and modify it to create a distressed leather shader.

This is our starting point:

As you can see, the Diffuse color has a lot more variation to it than our texture. Replace the procedurally mixed setup in the Diffuse slot with a single texture.

Start by opening the original leather texture in Photoshop and adding multiple layers with spots, streaks, patches, etc., until you have something similar to this:

Deepen the contrast of the Glossiness map.

Bring up the Bump level to make the leather look older.

Now that you have the basic look, add some more worn areas.

Paint a mask for worn areas (in this example, we used Mari). The Diffuse texture can be adjusted directly, but since this one is tiled and not covering the entire model, we need to use a different approach.

We want lighter areas to have a lighter Diffuse color, so create a lighter version of the Diffuse texture and use a mix map to blend the two together.

Add some cracks, as seen in the reference photo.

Use a VrayBlendMtl and blend the current material with one that looks exactly like it, but with lighter Diffuse and lower Glossiness.

You can either create new maps for this purpose, or blend the existing ones with colors and values, as shown in the example. Either way, the resulting material will not be too visible, so it’s not imperative.

Blend them together using a custom crackle mask. We painted one (in Mari), and this is how it looks on the object:

Set up a VrayBlendMtl with the worn leather as Base, regular leather as Coat, and crackle mask as Blend Amount.

And here is our final result.

Perhaps the cracks could be a bit thinner, but that would require a larger map resolution.