Can people please share their small fake scale stone surface shader settings with as few exploded features as possible? I've still not figured this out years later. I know a lot of people just mask out bad stones? That's fine and dandy, but what I create seems to have too much chaos to mask manually. :( So I end up using very, very basic stones with tiny warping to make them not appear smooth in a render, but they still usually end up polygony.
I realize this is an old post but have you since figured this out WAS?
Not really. I do try to use less extreme displacement, barely any, and keep them sorta at a distance.
This would be good to set up as a challenge.
If I use fake stones and if it's a feature, I usually bake out a displacement map and fix it in something like Mudbox. But that takes time and frankly is a pain.
Would be great if there was a procedural solution.
Well I was going to reply and say with udder confidence that I've got you for once WAS but saying that out loud made me realize how unlikely that would be. 😊 In any event, I will still share what I originally thought. Who knows, even if it's not exactly what you were asking for it might be useful.
Here you are WAS. It also includes a internal network version that's been largely unsuccessful. Hope this is of some use.
Thanks for the share. They look very nice.
I will share another kinda complex setup in a bit here using the hero boulders setup. Scratch that. The method is having issues in latest builds. Weird double/triple base boundaries to the stones for some reason when using a fake stones as the driver.
Hmm. Getting somewhere with a new attempt... stay tuned...
Then again maybe not. When I lowered into negatives for the scalar floor, it makes the FS scalar appear as one clump, which gave the illusion of nice rocks just cause you can't see any sides. When the scalars floor is just 0 we still have hard FS edges.
The trick is to blow them up just a tad by an offset variable, either from a surface shader or a PF (so you won't see the hard edge on zero), and have the displacement add its positive and negative displacement on that slightly blown-up stone. Negative decreasing the blown up 'bubble' again, positive adding to it. But then you easily get stone sides crossing eachother, or the negative displacement is more than the offset and you see the hard edge again, so it's a careful balance.
This helps smooth them, but will guarantee exploded stones here and there where geometry is wonky on the stone before offsetting. Also weirdly causes the pancaked tops weird weird melted boundaries.
Probably caused by small displacements in the first place, hence the smoothing of the surface shader 'required'. Which I don't always like, as it smoothes stuff. They're great to have, but for close-ups sometimes hard to manage. Easy for bigger distance, though.
Quote from: WAS on May 06, 2021, 05:16:31 PMHmm. Getting somewhere with a new attempt... stay tuned...
Then again maybe not. When I lowered into negatives for the scalar floor, it makes the FS scalar appear as one clump, which gave the illusion of nice rocks just cause you can't see any sides. When the scalars floor is just 0 we still have hard FS edges.
Hi WAS, Please could you post a screengrab of the node layout, I'm struggling to connect the .tgc file. Thank you in advance.
It's really just lowering the black point or scalar floor of a fake stones scalar. This gave an illusion of better rocks by just sinking their boundaries.
Sorry WAS, I wasn't at all clear! My problem is super basic, I just don't know how to connect the .tgc to the default scene.
On PixelPushers second TGC you can either input your terrain into the Main Input of Surface layer 01 then you can take the Output of Surface layer 01 and input it into your planet, or whatever shaders after that.
Or he also provided the pebbles in the same TGC inside the Surface Layer named Pebbles. You can take this node and input it to the Child Input of a surface layer and apply it that way too.
Thanks a lot WAS, I thought it would be embarrassingly simple! :-[ Oops, nearly forgot, thanks also to pixelpusher!