Wrestling with mud

AndyWelder · January 17, 2012, 05:08:48 AM

As some of you may know most of my recent renders do show cart trails. The reason is simply because the renders are inspired by my occasional walks and bike rides in a pretty rural part of Eindhoven (where I live). Now I wanted to take realism to a next level and depict the muddy puddles you get after a rain shower so I searched this forum and found some information on how to achieve that. However... the methods described didn't result in what I had in mind, probably because I didn't fully understand what was presented there. I even did consult Ulco because of one of his mud shaders... Playing did become wrestling and that's why I decided to try a direct approach: A "Reflective shader" connected to a "Power Fractal" connected to a "Surface shader". And it worked! The result was not 100% what I was looking for so but knowing I was on the right track I started to tweak settings and change connections and that resulted in this image, "Detail Clean".
Now curious about how grassy vegetation would influence the light play I did add some grasses and that did result in "Detail with grass".
The latter had one flaw IMO: The grass objects didn't stick to their designated boundaries: Some grew on the trail. Now what?
Previous experimenting with terrain settings made me aware of some "weird" behavior of populations restricted by masks: Changing the "Gradient patch size" of the "Compute Terrain" did change the angle of the objects distribution. I.e. with a GPS of "1000" vegetation masked by a road that went from north to south now covered an area that went from east to west. Hmmm... Ulco did confirm this was known behavior and also informed me changing the GPS to very low values would result in longer render times for the terrain. I took that for granted and decided to lower the GPS to 0.01. And look it there!! The grass did stick to its boundaries but now the altitude constraints of the mud surface needed some adjustment. After that was done I did render "Detail with grassREV".
I'm happy with it, for now. A full render of the landscape is on it's way as I write this.

AndyWelder · January 17, 2012, 07:03:32 AM

Here are the files used for the above renders, cleaned up so there wouldn't be warnings about missing .TGO's.

Henry Blewer · January 17, 2012, 08:05:00 AM

Nice looking ruts. This also has a lot of good information, thank you. I have had some descent mud by using the subsurface settings and adjusting the water shaders reflection and transparency. Your method here looks better.

rcallicotte · January 17, 2012, 09:45:44 AM

Wow. Andy, thanks for your generosity.

inkydigit · January 17, 2012, 03:12:04 PM

bedankt Andy!

Kadri · January 17, 2012, 03:29:41 PM

The images do look nice.Thanks for the files Andy

bobbystahr · January 17, 2012, 08:20:12 PM

Thanks Andy played with this shader a bit in a render at Rendo I think..."After The Rain"...be fun to see your approach

Dune · January 18, 2012, 03:30:32 AM

Thanks for sharing your setup, Andy. One question (2 actually): why do you have a color in the opacity default shader? If it is meant to clean out water rendering outside the masked area, it is better to set it to black, IMO. Put me right if I got this wrong, guys.
And the displacement shader inside the water shader is useless as it is, as it needs a function input. Probably an artifact?

But the result is very nice!! Some clumps of clay, tiny pebbles in the mud would make this even better, IMO.

Tangled-Universe · January 18, 2012, 03:36:52 AM

This looks splendid Andy

I agree with Dune that adding those tiny little extra elements would be the icing on the cake!

Cheers,
Martin

AndyWelder · January 18, 2012, 03:47:58 PM

Thank you all for the positive feedback!

QuoteAnd the displacement shader inside the water shader is useless as it is, as it needs a function input. Probably an artifact?

Yup, a left-over from an earlier experiment.

Quote..why do you have a color in the opacity default shader? If it is meant to clean out water rendering outside the masked area, it is better to set it to black, IMO.

Good question; the color it has now is , once again, a left-over from an earlier experiment. The setup is copied from dandelO's masked water clip and , I just did a check, has the color of the shader for the opacity function set to white... From my answers you can tell I'm more of the "empiric type": Most of the times I really don't have a clue of what exactly I'm doing but will see what happens if I connect this to that. Oooops!

QuoteSome clumps of clay, tiny pebbles in the mud would make this even better, IMO.

Funny, in an earlier stage I had the displacements set in such a way it looked like there were little pebbles/clumps of clay but I did discard that because the soil here is mostly pure sand with a little bit of loam at some places so it didn't look like the tracks I know. Anyway, will keep this in mind for an other render; in the mean time I'm busy with adding some tire tracks as suggested in the other thread in the image sharing section.

cyphyr · January 18, 2012, 04:22:47 PM

Quote from: AndyWelder on January 18, 2012, 03:47:58 PM
... From my answers you can tell I'm more of the "empiric type": Most of the times I really don't have a clue of what exactly I'm doing but will see what happens if I connect this to that. Oooops!

Lol, err I can relate!

RichARD

choronr · January 18, 2012, 05:30:30 PM

Thank you Andy, this is excellent. Close to the ground is often as interesting as an eye level/horizon point of view.