Thanks for the input and comments, everyone. I, too, am still not entirely satisfied with the hard edge, but I think it looks plausible now instead of just wrong
. I also understand how the stones might be too sharp for some people, but I think I'm going to leave them the way they are. As you've all said - can't make it perfect for everybody
.
It's true, Martin, that the big technical focuses here were the arch and the dust storm, but I also had to fight a bit with the fake stones to get something that was at least realistic enough to blend with the rest of the scene. Relatedly, perhaps someone can chime in with a word of advice on how to fix my problem: at one point I decided to use some intersect underlying between the larger fake stones and the terrain. However, even after I did that the shape of the smaller fake stones that I added later were always somewhat distorted and didn't have the same shape as the other ones (I disabled smoothing effect in the surface layer, which helped, but didn't completely fix it). Does anybody have ideas about how to get intersect underlying to have minimal impact after the surface layer where it's performed?
Also, I haven't tried scaling my arches up to that level yet, although it certainly should be possible. A couple of things that come to mind:
- The displacement along x in the redirect shader is not applied evenly across the arch: there is a mask that in fact varies it over the course of the base, otherwise it would always become the little paper thing you mention. Try experimenting with slightly different values of Constant scalar 01 and Constant scalar 01_1.
- Increasing the base surface area also helps, so you can certainly expand that.
- If you're getting that folding effect, you can always get rid of it by displacing everything outwards by a few meters.
Finally, if you want to clean up and rearrange nodes to post it for people, that would be great. I was going to just post my project file, but it would be good to have someone with experience in this kind of thing go through and make it more legible.