Fake Stones Modes

Started by WAS, September 13, 2018, 12:50:03 AM

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WAS

:P Hi, it's me again. Lol

Would it be possible to add an A and B mode to Fake Stone Shader? I notice the standard fake stones seem to be based on voronoi. That's fantastic and works well for raw shattered stone to erode manually, but what if there was an option B, which was based on Perlin or something and produced round stones to than work off of?

It's super duper hard to defeat the chiseled edges of fake stones and populations can be slow, hard to work with, and sometimes not practical with terrain.

I've tried recreating the "Fake stone" look with circled created form Voronoi 3D A Vector, but I can't get the offsets quite right to than work with other shaders like fake stones (not best with blue nodes in the slightest, or terrain displacement on a fine-tuned basis)

Dune

I gues that's pretty hard, as perlin is often quite irregular in 3D shape, and you may get weird stones, not 'perfectly' rounded ones. Perlin 3D might be an option but the density is not high enough.

WAS

#2
Quote from: Dune on September 13, 2018, 01:26:36 AM
I gues that's pretty hard, as perlin is often quite irregular in 3D shape, and you may get weird stones, not 'perfectly' rounded ones. Perlin 3D might be an option but the density is not high enough.

Voronoi 3D A Vector also can create perfect circles, that can get quite dense (in fact too dense really for practical crater fields).

Getting 100% coverage may not be possible, but at the same time, 100% coverage with fake stones doesn't look like fake stones exactly, more just like diff voronoi piped through a disp shader. I'm not sure if 100% coverage is a deal breaker or not. I wouldn't think with round circles you could truly get 100% without multiple layers since they are round, and collision. The way stones work now they fit in like a puzzle almost like rough crushed gravel for roads that almost "interlocks" when compressed for best life.

Dune

There was (once) a setup by mogn (I believe) for softer 'fake stones', but that needs a compute normal at least.

WAS

Quote from: Dune on September 13, 2018, 05:12:00 AM
There was (once) a setup by mogn (I believe) for softer 'fake stones', but that needs a compute normal at least.

Will see what I can come up with, but I feel that's taking a huge step backwards for practicality, as I know in a thicket of rocks and a full scene that will drag rendering down.

WAS

#5
Hmm I can't seem to reproduce smooth stones with compute normal. Tried smooth surface, and all sorts of patch sizes, they remain about the same as far as chiseled, but break as far as stones.

Additionally I started another attempt at round stones with Voronoi 3D A Vector, and for some reason the offsetting to create the stone lateral displacement just "blooms" the stone like a flower.

Dune

Check this out.

WAS

Oh these look suberb Dune, wow! Can't wait to check them out. Just woke up due to kiddo haha

The fake stone one doesn't look half bad at all from what I can see, just the collision.

WAS

So the only thing that seems to interfere with the setup is the twist and sheer, which apparently is not only applied to child elements but main input of of it's child inputted shader. Which also explains why I couldn't model some other stuff in other projects without a mess because it was applying to my main displacement. >.<

Dune

Yes, that's right. You could possibly move it up, but this was just a quick setup, to show two ways of doing (far from perfect) round stones. And the tilt and shear is only there to lower the rocks, maybe not even needed if you play with the other values. I sometimes make a  combination of a little displacement by normal, so it goes also up, and another displacement only lateral.