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Edge Dirt

Surface → Edge Dirt

Dirt and grime streaked along an edge. It is Ambient Occlusion's strip with a different texture on it — the same geometry, the same live rebuild, the same fades — and it is a separate tool for one reason: an AO shadow and a dirt streak are two strips on the same wall, and they must be able to sit there at once without one retexturing the other.

So Edge Dirt has its own settings, its own material, its own texture folder and its own panel, while sharing the machinery that builds the strip.

Making one

  1. Select the object, enter Edit Mode, edge select, pick the edges.
  2. Press Create Edge Dirt.

Build From offers Selection and Ground Level, exactly as Ambient Occlusion does — see Build From for what Ground Level is for.

The texture

Edge Dirt reads its own textures/ folder inside the add-on and wires whatever is there into the material automatically. The panel shows what it found.

There is no file picker on purpose: the texture travels with the add-on, so a scene handed to someone else looks the same on their machine. Drop a different file in that folder to change it.

Selected Strip

Identical to Ambient Occlusion's: Width, Surface Offset, Flip Direction, the across- and along-run fades, Position, and Bevel. All live.

Bevel Mesh works here now

Until recently Edge Dirt cut its source round into the mesh at creation, which works exactly once — the edge it rounded no longer existed afterwards, so the Bevel Mesh tick on the finished strip had nothing left to act on and did nothing at all.

It drives the same live Bevel modifier the other three tools use now. Ticking it rounds the source, dragging Width follows, unticking removes the modifier and leaves the source exactly as it was found. The Bevel target dropdown that existed only to describe the old behaviour is gone.

What it builds

  • the same strip Ambient Occlusion builds
  • UVMap 0 and Color 1
  • a seto_edgedirt material — separate from seto_fakeao on purpose, so retexturing the dirt cannot touch the AO
  • filed into the edge_dirt collection, or the source's Drawable collection