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a work in progress, I will tinker with this some more...some exploding stones...not sure why, all check boxes for stone density etc were un checked???this uses two distance shaders to restrict the large stones. minor pw=levels, saturation tweaks and jpegged etc. feel free to comment and/critique as these are always welcome and appreciated!
cheers
Jason
Great start Jason... I'd personally make the stones taller to give them more of a standing stone look when you sort out the exploding issue. Great idea though.
Cheers, Simon.
I agree. Cool beginning, though I love how the light touches the rocks and the grass without doing any more. :D
Indeed it looks like a pile of stones I left behind 150 years ago (in the real world). But the grass is too lawnish regular. You need tangled tall grass growing into a mess in the stones IMHO. The sandstone looks wonderful, like you could put your hands on them and feel the warmth of the sun.
Good work you've done here...
NKAID...
Take a deep breath:
Yeh, I had trouble with those pesky blighters (exploding stones) while putting together that Ben McDuffy thingy, even though, like yourself, I had Blend as Stone Density unchecked. I'm sure my problem was having very small scale displacement on my grass (power fractal displacement directly below my stones (above it on the node list). This is all in the shaders group, you understand. I think the problem arises when you use a Distribution shader to Slope constrain the stones, and have the Slope key set to Final normal. That setting picks up any small displacements you have immediately underlying your stones, but after the Compute terrain at the bottom of the Terrain group. Aha, I said, ahaha, I'm gonna bung a sneaky wee Compute terrain between the troublesome grass shader displacement and my stones. That'll sort it out. No it bleeping well didn't. If you then change the Slope key (of the Distribution shader for your stones) to Final terrain you are then picking up displacement info from the Compute terrain at the bottom of the Terrain group. But, because I had some severe displacement in the terrain group I still got some exploding stones. My stones stopped exploding when I changed the Slope key to Planet/Object normal. Of course they stopped exploding, the planet being flat (well flat in a spherical way, not in a flat earth way) before adding displacement, and therefore negating the need for a Slope constraint. Sheesh; in the end I don't know how I got rid of those exploding blighters. You know what, I think I just got lucky.
Ok, you can let your breath out.
Btw; DO let me know if the above sounds like a bag of bollox. Or, perhaps you found a smidgeon of sanity in the above stream of consciousness rant.
John
I left a comment on his Photostream. The exploding stones seem to come from using an altitude or slope constraint. I suggest using more fuzzy zone for the constraint. It seems that coming to the edge of a constraint the fake stones shader starts 'oh no, I am on a border' and starts trying to limit the fake stones size, but does not do this; causing the displacement to render weird.
This also seems to occur when a Surface Shader is used to displace and color the fake stones. I have not seen this occur when I make a node network to shade the fake stones. All the parts of the network get plugged into a merge shader, then plugged into the fake stone shader. This may all be foo, but I have not seem this since I dropped using a surface shader input to the fake stones.
I must learn to pay more attention. Distance shaders, not Distribution shaders. Henry's suggestion sounds good / makes sense. There could be some value in my ramble, though, for when a Distribution / Surface shader is used for constraint.
John
thanks for the comments folks, and yes John I catch your drift(after your edit!), though, there are no slope restraints I have tried having the stones as a child layer of a normal surface layer and a distribution shader...to no avail?? I think that njeneb touched on something that may help, 'fuzzy zone'...becuase of the (probably incorrect!) way I created the selection for the stone distribution, using two distance shaders and a merge shader...I tried several merge methods untill I found the selection I wanted, I was not being particularly logical/mathematical, I have contemplated this some more and will change my method of merge mode and how I use the distance shader, I am away from my mac this weekend, so I wont know untill I get back....I will keep you updated..
ps Simon I have tried to make the stones taller, buthey lose their 'nice' displacements, again I think that some of this has something to do with the way the stones are restricted by the distance shader?
It was worth a shot... they still look damn cool as they are (barring the exploded parts).
Simon.
interesting idea! ;)
this sort-of reminds me of something from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, those circles of little stones with a boulder in the middle which hide those holes in ground that lead to under chambers with chests in them.