Fake Stone Shaders; *V1 finished on page 3*

Started by Tangled-Universe, October 25, 2010, 12:06:56 PM

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Tangled-Universe

Hi everybody,

Thought it was time to do some TG2 again after some time "off".

I'm currently working on a couple of fake stone shaders with the intention to release them through NWDA at some point.
Not only will you get access to these stones, but also to a in depth tutorial, as the .tgd file is not for the faint of TG-heart ;D

So far I'm pretty happy. It surely needs some improvements like perhaps a bit more colour-varation, better fractal to create small bumps and tweaking the main fractal to prevent exploding stones (as you can see on in the centre).

The stones are situated under a 30m tall tree. I've used soft-shadows with 0.5 radius and 25 samples to be absolutely sure to have grain-free soft shadows. A couple of samples less might have been sufficient, but I did have the time to render very long, so why not? :)

Martin

TheBlackHole

I don't think Image Sharing is for photos. :D
They just issued a tornado warning and said to stay away from windows. Does that mean I can't use my computer?

cyphyr

Lol @ TBH :)
Great stones there !
I definitely approve of the tutorial, I've heard complaints (well comments really) in the past about files being available with out any real guide to the "why's" of how they were constructed in the first place.
Side note: One repeated question on this forum is "how do I plug these nodes into my hierarchy without loosing my textures" I hope you'll be able to add this in to your tut.
:)
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
/|\

Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

FrankB

Martiiiiin, finally :)

Stones are looking great, especially the large ones. I also like the smaller ones, but would prefer them to not grow on each other, if you know what I mean. If you're looking for some hints on what to potentially improve, that'd be one thing to look after.

Cheers
Frank

Mahnmut

When I saw your name next to some basic looking topic like "fake stones" I knew there was something going on...
Looks like sprained ancle terrain.  In my opinion, its just the way the small stones "grow" on each other that is more realistic (for some kind of terrain) than any fake stones I ve seen in TG so far.
So did you build your own fake stones, or is that just some really advanced use of the inbuilt ones?
Best regards,
Jan

Naoo

Hi

Realy fantastic!
I aggree with TheBlackHole.


ciao
Naoo

inkydigit

looking pretty awesome so far, Martin...fake stones are hard to get looking right, almost a holy grail (for me at least!), and these are looking 99.9% right, a tutorial and a tgd will be an excellent resource/tool!
cheers
Jason

freelancah

Looks extremely realistic! Nice job.

Seth

great job !!!
and impressive lighting too !
i really love the shadows ^^

Gannaingh

Those are some very pretty stones! Excellent work!


Dune

Congratulations on these rocks, Martin. Absolutely stunning, definitely a must have. And the lighting and subtle grass adds to a perfect setting.

---Dune

domdib

#12
Excellent work - very convincing colours and displacements - interesting that the smaller stones are much less angular than the big ones. Is that adjustable?

P.S. It would be interesting to see the same set-up both closer up, and also in long shot. When you've got time  ;)

RArcher

This is great work Martin.  I really like the little ridges on the bigger rocks, makes them really seem natural.

Tangled-Universe

Thanks guys :)
A new iteration is in the making, hope to post some soon!

Richard: Thanks, glad you like it. I agree with your suggestion to cover the implementation of fake stones into recent projects. I'll try to explain that as clear as possible.
The fun thing with this setup is that you'll only need to connect just one single surface layer into your current network to have the fake stones there. There are some conditions of course, but like I told you I'll try to cover these all.

Frank: Hey thanks dude :) I know what you mean, but it's not easy to prevent it completely. There might be a trick to solve it entirely, but haven't figured that out yet. So far I'm trying to avoid it using the correct blend-mode in the merge-shader and by carefully tweaking the density for each layer.

Jan: The stones on top of each other can look nice in some ways. Though like Frank mentions it sometimes can look odd as well. Perhaps also a matter of taste, although the "natural" way would be that most of the stones are separated. I used the normal fake stones shader, so no blue node wizardry :)

Dom: good point you make which I haven't covered in my starting post. I've designed these stones mainly for this type of view but also more close-up. I'll include these when I'll post my next iteration. I'll see if I can make this shader work from a greater distance, but there's no guarantee. I'd need to make some adjustments and include that shaderset as a separate stone shader into the package.
The reason why the smaller stones tend to look less angular, although I disagree they really do, is because of the displacement-scale and amplitude. It's very likely that a small stone will have very low variation of displacement-scale and same goes for displacement amplitude. You'll have a very evenly displaced stone then.

Cheers,
Martin