Coating Lab

Real surface finishes for game gun models, worn where use wears a gun.

An MCP server that gives game gun models real surface finishes, worn where use wears a gun.

• A finish library with sources. Anodized aluminium, manganese and zinc phosphate, blued and nitrided steel, ceramic coatings (FDE, OD green, tungsten, graphite, coyote), stainless, polymer, rubber, brass, copper, lead, walnut. Each is a physically based value (linear colour, metallic, roughness) with what shows when it wears through and the sources of its numbers. Values reasoned from descriptions are marked as estimates.
• Coating variants. A spec puts a finish on each material slot of a model, in as many variants as you want (an issued rifle, a two-tone FDE build, an abused one), each at a wear level: new, issued, worn or abused.
• Wear from evidence, baked once. In Blender, into the model's vertex colours: exposed edges, where the hands work the gun (its grip, the support hand, the controls), where parts slide (a magazine in its well, a stock on its tube), and dirt where the surface is occluded and round the muzzle and the port. Every variant reads the same masks, so a new variant costs nothing.
• Checks. Every finish against the rules physically based rendering rests on. Every variant's worn share against its level, and no wear inside corners.
• One formula everywhere. The checks, the look-dev renders and an engine's material compute wear the same way (coat.py), so what passes is what the player sees.

Model Lab (modellab-mcp) builds give their own slots (upper, lower, barrel and more), marks and parts: spec_for_modellab makes a coating spec from a build in one call.

Install

Python 3.10 or later and Blender 4.2 or later.

pip install coatinglab-mcp

{"mcpServers": {"coatinglab": {"command": "coatinglab-mcp"}}}

Tools

The masks and the formula

The bake writes the vertex colour Col:

An engine's material follows the formula in src/coatinglab/coat.py. A wear level is a threshold: the higher the level, the weaker the mask that already wears through. A grunge texture breaks wear up but never makes wear.

What is estimated

• Every roughness value. No source maps a finish's surface to a rendering roughness.
• The colours of the anodized, phosphate, blued, nitrided and most ceramic finishes. The standards set processes, not colours. OD green and coyote come from FED-STD-595 colour numbers.
• The wear amounts. Sources say where guns wear, not how fast. Each level is set so Model Lab's M4A1 lands in the middle of its band.
• A hand's zone is a sphere: on a round handguard the support hand's wear reaches its top as well as its underside.

License

MIT