Rocks

[efflux]

I meant to post about this ages ago but never got around to it. I wanted to tweak it to be a little clearer and adjust a few things.

This is a stones shader with a lot of power to alter the stones (rocks would be a better description for this) shape and how the rocks blend with surrounding. The fake stones always has a sharp blend which is OK some times but not always ideal. Fake stones can get nasty if rocks are flat and hence should have some covering of surrounding material instead of those stand out shapes of flat texture you see.

Check out what bias and gain nodes do to see how these nodes operate here.

You can also use two textures for the last layer of texture on the rocks and they will all have varying degrees of blend between the two textures. I have only colour control set up on these textures.

I have labeled what controls do what. Most of the others nodes have abbreviated names. This is just to keep the graph clean looking. Obviously if you delve further you can see all the nodes functions.

I kept the blending of basic initial displacement and the blending of the further texture separate as this seemed to give much better control of the blend between rocks and surrounding surface.

The lateral displacement is like "pancake" except controlled by a fractal. This lateral displacement is controlled via the colour tab in that fractal (IMPORTANT).

I also slope controlled the lateral displacement because higher lateral displacement on horizontal areas of the rocks can become a mess. You will want to play around with this control.

This basic graph is useful for a lot of things. However, it is based on voronoi so good for rocks. Voronoi could be changed to perlin then completely different shapes are possible. This would probably require a bunch of retuning to the graph settings. Rock texture blend would not work the same.

Any improvements, mistakes spotted or alterations to see what else could be done would be cool. I haven't really tweaked much with this. Lateral displacement tweaks (I've not sorted this as good as it could be especially the slope setting - too controlled to steep slopes only, I think) and more interesting textures on the rocks would be the obvious start.

There appears to be some nasty black areas here and there. The same thing you often see when displacing heavily in TG2. Not sure why.

EDIT: tgd has been removed but a new thread called New Rocks will be created.

[folder]

looks great was just about to go to sleep , i guess a few more hours on tg2 is ok 

folder

[Dune]

This really looks promising, efflux. Thanks for sharing! I was always a little troubled by the sometimes straight edges of fake stones.

---Dune

[efflux]

By the way, the nodes called displacement blend and texture blend are the ones that control the blending between the stones and the surrounding ground. You'll see if you adjust those. These graphs will show you what those nodes do.

[FrankB]

brilliant stuff, Efflux, impressive and creative!

Frank

[efflux]

Actually, you may not need that lateral displacement slope node. Just try bypassing it. I was doing something else that caused problems with the lateral displacement.

[rcallicotte]

Thanks efflux!

[efflux]

I hope to see some tests using interesting ground surfaces like sand for example so the sand slightly rides up onto the stones.

I am working on another planet at the moment but intend to build this in.

[efflux]

There is another way to adjust the stones distribution or density by utilizing the voronoi 3D Cell node.

[efflux]

If anyone can work out how to slope distribute the stones without messing up the stones colour or without messing up the colour of other slope areas it would be useful. I'm working on it but along with a bunch of other things.