"Embossed" snow

Started by Lucio, February 09, 2007, 01:48:55 PM

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Lucio

Inspired by the wonderful "deep" snow created by Olivier Cousinou I tried to work on something similar on my own, attempting to create a detailed snow layer with a little shiny and somewhat icy crust.  The result is a bit complicated surface shader node, and now I'll try to explain with my sloppy english the path I followed. I've also attached a clip file with the entire node.

Here's a capture of the shaders complex (don't mind about the lines on top left, I have some strange issue with my video card)



and a very poor schematic view of how they works



First of all here's Snow_base. It's a simple surface layer with a max slope constraint, intersect underlying activated (with intersection zone and intersection shift values set to 0) and the "terrain normal" option set as slope key, to render the snow correctly.

The first child surface is Snow_vertical emboss: this is the surface layer that gives vertical displacement. You can change his "thickness" by playing with displacement offset value; I've set it to 0.1
It has the same slope constraint of Snow_base, but a bit higher fuzzy zone: playing with this value permits you to change the shape of snow edges, following this scheme



The second child surface is Snow_lateral emboss: this is a power fractal shader with displacement set on "lateral only", to give a somewhat "bumpy" appearance to the snow borders.

Then we have another child surface, named Snow_grainy surface: this is another surface layer with max slope constraint set on a bit lower value than the others, to limit his action on top of the snow. It creates a fuzzy and grainy surface using a power fractal shader as displacement function, with very small values.

Finally here's a default shader named Snow_shader, used to give some shininess, reflectivity and translucency to the resulting surface.

Here are two test renders





note on the second image some beautiful feature like "dusty" and icy fragments, as you can see sometime in natural snow

Depending on the slope and the type of image you want to achieve you'll have to play very much with fuzzy zone and displacement offset on the Snow_vertical emboss layer, to define a good shape for the snow edges.

Hope you've understood my explanation  :-\  If anyone wants to work on the .tgc file to improve it or to give some hint is very welcome!


Regards,

Lucio

Volker Harun

Lucio!

You are amazing!

Thank you very much!

Volker Harun

Will

excellent, thanks :)


Regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

The Geostation

Crunchy!

Andrew Randle
The Geostation
Andrew Randle
The Geostation

myriac

thanx lucio, this is great !!!

Lucio

thanks  :)

I'll try some winter ambientation with that. I recommend you to work and experiment over the node, any improvement would be great

rcallicotte

Thanks Lucio.  May the sunshine kiss you.   :-*
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

king_tiger_666

cool thanks for sharing... and i have a glacial render with moraines under way so i might try pluggin this in:D.. see what i end up with

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Lucio

Maybe you can take it as an understatement, but I have to say that it's very impressive to discover that the deeper you go in the details of the node network, the greatest is the potential unleaded by the software, truly enormous. And it's all extremely logical and pretty simple to manage

old_blaggard

That's incredible!  I'm really impressed by the realism you've got there!  Fantastic job!
http://www.terragen.org - A great Terragen resource with models, contests, galleries, and forums.

Tangled-Universe

Wowwww....really really amazing :) Thanks a lot for sharing one of the first "holy grails" of TG2 ;D

moodflow

#11
Nice work!  It already has that sub-surface scattering look!  
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RedSquare

Lucio you're an iced diamond.  ;D

hyper1

Lucio,
Excellent!  Your explaination is very clear and your example is wonderful.
Thanks for sharing!
Quote from: Lucio on February 09, 2007, 01:48:55 PM
Inspired by the wonderful "deep" snow created by Olivier Cousinou I tried to work on something similar on my own, attempting to create a detailed snow layer with a little shiny and somewhat icy crust.  The result is a bit complicated surface shader node, and now I'll try to explain with my sloppy english the path I followed. I've also attached a clip file with the entire node.
Regards,
Lucio

king_tiger_666

you should make a tutorial on this... it would be good to add to the tutorial base on these forums..

<a href="www.hobbies.nzaus.co.nz/">My  Terragen Downloads & Gallery</a>