Quick Texturing Tip: Faking Stacks of Money With a Texture

Stacks of paper and money are one of those things that would be complete slowverkill to create as individual planes with SSS. Unless you need them to flap at the edges, a stack of bills can be easily faked with a series of lines along the edges that are then used as a mask for a stretched edge fake in Photoshop, and later as a separate bump map:

The render (notice the light catching the bump on the stack at the bottom):

The one complication to this workflow is that Photoshop will usually detect that you’re trying to edit a bank note image and not let you edit it:

That’s why I had to do the initial layering in the excellent and cheap photo editor Pixelmator and the banknote image wasn’t detected in the layered image used above. If you want to do a dollar stack, you might need to use The GIMP if you’re looking for a free Photoshop alternative.

1. nuclearquail likes this
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