Another Approach to Fake Stones

[WAS]

Here is another approach to fake stones, using the internal colour variation to drive the surface of a duplicated fake stones used for actual displacement, also clamping the colours to solve near black colours in shadows, with some other little bits I do.

Used exaggerated colours for demonstration. The compute normals slow things down a bit, but smooth edges.

[digitalguru]

Very interesting, I'll have a look when I get home.

I must admit my fake stone setup is driving me slightly bonkers at the moment.

[bobbystahr]

Very cool Jordan, gonna give this a run later today.

[digitalguru]

and another 

I wanted a fake stones setup that could use the color variation in the fake stones shader to mix 4 power fractals:

[attachimg=1]

gives a nice variation per stone by splitting out the fake stone shader into masks based on the greyscale color (colors exaggerated like WASasquatchs version)

could be improved, but works ok for the scene I'm working on (mountain scree and road gravel)

is there a way to do a hue rotation based on a scalar value? that would help add some more variation

[WAS]

Great share, still looking through it. Nice use of functions.

[digitalguru]

thanks - tried a few seeds and seems to avoid the dreaded exploding stones too 

[AndyWelder]

Thank you, WASasquatch and digitalguru! Now that there's little inspiration here for projects there's more time to dissect these files!

[sboerner]

Thanks Jordan and DG! Great shares. Looking forward to going through these later today.

[RichTwo]

Mighty fine work and thanks for sharing!  And I haven't a clue about how it all works.  But it does and unlike the FS node, the features actually sit on TOP of the surface layers rather than underneath them.  As a test, I gathered all the nodes a little more tightly and saved them as a .tgc.  I then inserted it onto Hannes' Default Scene which has 4 layers.  Afterward, I also changed the base color toward red to get no green rocks.  The clip has the original settings.  So along with a test image, here is the clip which so far seems to work flawlessly.