fake stones tests (WIP)

[Kevin F]

Inspired by T-U's new fake stones I thought I'd give it another go. I noticed T-U mentioned use of the merge shader as part of the process to produce the stones and since I'd been playing with this shader for my zebra crossing scenes, and getting some interesting effects I thought I'd try it on fake stones.
The stones here have surface surface shaders made up of merged PF's . This gives plenty of room for tweaking the various parameters which together with size and displacement values gives good results. Not quite at the "lichen" stage of T-U but interesting non the less.
More POV's and lighting tests to do. Will post more later.
C&C welcome.

[Tangled-Universe]

Looking pretty good Kevin I'm happy to see I sometimes can inspire people to experiment.
Nice colours you have there already, hope you can add some more variation.
My fake stone shader v2 is going to be this type of sandstone as well, so that's a nice coincidence
I wonder: those stretched fractals on the foreground surface, are those also applied to the stones?

Cheers,
Martin

[Kevin F]

Thank you master!

I wonder: those stretched fractals on the foreground surface, are those also applied to the stones?

Cheers,
Martin

No, they're not, but I was thinking of doing just that!

[Naoo]

Hi

The midground and the big rocks are excellent.


ciao
Naoo

[Oshyan]

In the foreground stretched fractal bits I see several parts that look like rose thorns! I see a procedural rose thorn shader to go along with Dune's dew shader shown recently(ish): http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10580.msg108909#msg108909

- Oshyan

[Kevin F]

Here's another version (without the thorn shader!). Again this is using the merge shader for the surface of the fake stones. This one uses 2 PF's  controlled by a warp shader with a perlin 3D scalar as it's warper and another PF as the shader.
The surface texture od the larger rock is very nice (IMHO), but getting it is very hit and miss with little room for control.
So many of the parameters in TG2 are interdependent and precise control of what you are doing is sometimes too vague, with guess work and trial and error producing the final results. Still it's good fun experimenting but sometimes it's hard to remember exactly how a certain effect was acheived!.

The shadows in this one don't seem right to me. They're too uniform and should be darker the nearer to the rock/ground interface. Anyone have any ideas about this?
Oh, and does anybody know how to get the effect of sand piling up against a rock as if wind blown?
C&C welcome.

[domdib]

Agree it's a good texture  - about the sand, I've a feeling there may be a clip on the NWDA community store for this.

[dandelO]

The shadows in this one don't seem right to me. They're too uniform and should be darker the nearer to the rock/ground interface. Anyone have any ideas about this?

You'll get the effect you're after by checking 'GI surface details'. Shadows should then be darker at points of contact and fade out in intensity the further away the casting surface is from the receiving surface.

GI surface details - Off
GI surface details - On

It'll probably double your render time, mind.

[Kevin F]

Thanks dandelO, the original was at GI detail 2, sample quality 2 no GI surface detail off.
I re-rendered with surface detail on but there was very little difference, so I re-rendered again at 3,3 and surface detail on and here's the result. This time it's much improved (but could be better). The render time went up to 2.5 hrs from 1hr 18.

[cyphyr]

Its a bit of a "hack" but you could try using two suns. Put them both in the same place, make their combined strength the same as your original sun and enable a quite wide soft shadow, about 15 on one and a far less soft shadow on the other (you'll have to trial and error to get it right in your scene). Like I say it's a hack but it will give a "graded shadow and "should" be conciderably faster than high GI settings
Richard
Hmm, scratch this, seems to only really worl on larger scale scenes.

[Henry Blewer]

You can also try an Envio Light set to ambient occlusion in the Lighting Tab. I do this sometimes to soften shadows.