Best Method for Colouring Fake Stones

Started by WAS, May 23, 2018, 04:01:24 PM

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WAS

What methods do you use to colour fake stones? I have some merged stone setups that have their own colour in their surface layer, but they are completely masked by the underlying terrains colour. I tried just changing the last merge shader grayscale and using a colour adjust for more solid whites, but for some reason the mask didn't match the rocks. 

The colour of the fake stones shows in the merge shader before piping into the surface layers child node, after that, viewing the surface layer shows a solid carpet of terrain colour.

To clarify, this is more a lateral colouring issue, or where overhanging occurs.

luvsmuzik

Are checking that the first surface layer where you are piping fake stones to is apply color unchecked? You might try a transform input before your surface layer that has your color setup as its child. Also uncheck vary color in the RGB settings in fake stones surface tab.

WAS

#2
Quote from: luvsmuzik on May 23, 2018, 04:45:55 PM
Are checking that the first surface layer where you are piping fake stones to is apply color unchecked? You might try a transform input before your surface layer that has your color setup as its child. Also uncheck vary color in the RGB settings in fake stones surface tab.

I have stone colour options unchecked so their surface layers apply colour.

The surface layer has it's colour disabled, as to get the base terrain colours through.

I moved my stones to another scene and began playing with them, and I think it may have been the warp shader effecting the stones colour masking when Y is warped. I used a redirect on only X and Z and colour seems to be working much better, except under overhangs. Going to test them back in the lunar file and see if it still works. If not it may be related to underlying displacements in terrain.

Update: Nope. Still bright gray surface stones, not the colour of their fake stones surace of the population rocks which have no issue showing the colour. So it must be displacements in the terrain that break it, as the testing file had no displacement (see attached image). It's hard to tell in the test file, but that gray, has a hint of red, and is much darker than the light solid grays for the lunar surface, which is somehow being translated to the whole rocks.

bobbystahr

Go into the Surface layer and click Smoothing, that  should work.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
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Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

luvsmuzik

This may also be another case of hanging another compute terrain after stones. Do you have a chain of merged stones?

WAS

Quote from: bobbystahr on May 24, 2018, 04:16:15 PM
Go into the Surface layer and click Smoothing, that  should work.

Yeah, that's what I initially thought, but would unfortunately than mask out the fine detail below, and in-between rocks, and if masked, distort the child rocks. It's almost like a vector mask would need to be built based on the fake stone displacements, but it's tricky when small stones don't even show on your mask levels.

Quote from: luvsmuzik on May 24, 2018, 04:28:05 PM
This may also be another case of hanging another compute terrain after stones. Do you have a chain of merged stones?

Yeah it's 4 fake stone shaders merged up with Add and a mix of 1