Hey, I have a question about snow surfacing. Real snow has a glassy, crystal like bumpiness to it and it is reflective [shiny]. Does anyone know who to achieve this type of detailed effect in TG2?
not sure on the bumpiness, but the shinyness can be done by adding a child water shader.
i guess the bumpiness could be done with displacement, a very small power fractal and very low-scale displacement. Not sure how well that'd work, or very, very small fake stones.
Bumpiness I think is created by the fractal breakup part of the surface layer. If I'm correct you should untick "only break up colour" if you want the actual surface layers to be bitty. Layering surfaces like this should give you the right effect.
As for the reflective aspect, you need to add a reflective shader as a child to the surface layer. Mess with the settings (for instance, reflection softness controls whether you have little specs of reflection, or an overall sheen).
Also you could try making a fake rock shader and having the dencity at like 4 and the size as soming really really small.
Regards,
Will
Quote from: oggyb on January 27, 2007, 05:41:42 AM
As for the reflective aspect, you need to add a reflective shader as a child to the surface layer. Mess with the settings (for instance, reflection softness controls whether you have little specs of reflection, or an overall sheen).
I find that adding the water shader as a child layer is about 5x faster than a reflective shader, and for the purposes of snow gives good enough results.
I didn't know that about the fractal breakup, I'll have to try that now. Can you get really smooth surfaces by lowering fractal breakup too, or would you have to use displacement?
Is there any real way of making a texture smooth the terrain?
When sub-surface scattering becomes available, this will also add to the realism in the top layers of the snow. Additionally, realistic icebergs will be a possibility.
This can technically already be faked.
If you make the snow your base colour layer (and then build everything else on top of it) and have white as the high colour and a medium-brightness blue as the low colour it seems to produce decent results.