I would like to add random spotting to the same face to decrease the amount of vertices needed. Take this Dalmatian for example, suppose its body was only made up of 12 faces. I would like to avoid making a texture as my actual model is more complicated. The spots are only one colour and the surrounding area is only one colour. How could I do this in cycles?
I would also like to know how to control the amount of spots produced.
If I understand correctly you try to find a procedural way to make some black and white spots on yout object. Here is a way to do it:
Make the following node chain : Texture Coordinate (Object output) > Voronoi Texture > ColorRamp > Diffuse BSDF > Material Output. With the Voronoi you will create the spots shapes and sizes and with the ColorRamp you will determine the space between the spots.
But as you can see the spots are a little bit too regular. If you want to introduce more accidents, before the Voronoi you can add a Color node > MixRGB (Add mode) and plug a Noise Texture on its other socket. This solution was inspired by Gleb Alexandrov's video.
You can procedurally generate such a texture and apply it to the mesh. This is not a lot of work and can get you some basic results going quickly.
The basic idea is that you take a predetermined mathematical function which assigns each point in space a value. Then you use those values as a color input. Blender makes this quite intuitive. This is what the node setup looks like:
The color ramp controls the dimensions of the spots, and you can mess around with the values of the Musgrave Texture to achieve different looks. The ones I used procuduced this result:
You can tweek the size of the spots with the "Scale" parameters, and their general shape with the color ramp. Hit me up if you have any further questions.
