Cracking Up

[fleetwood]

I saw some recent photos from NASA's Mars exploration that showed an interesting type of cracked rock terrain.
Have tried to render it fully procedurally.
Here is the NASA reference photo and my render.

(auto parts standing in for space debris are  from Artec Scans)

[Kadri]

I like the ground.

[Clay]

That's pretty cool!

[bobbystahr]

mind blowingly similar, well done.

[Dune]

Pretty good. I only think you gotta take the color out of the fake stones, so they take on the ground colors.

[archonforest]

That is a well done!

[Hannes]

Fantastic! I'd leave a bit of the grey in the stones shader. They seem to be grey and covered partially by some red mars dust.

[fleetwood]

Thanks all.
To my eye it looks like there are a few grey stones somewhat covered in dust in the photo and in many other Mars photos. I think the predominant red ground tends to make grey stones appear more blue to the eye (my eye anyway) than they really are because of contrasting effects of opposite colors.

In any case I chose to make some of my stones have a bit of blue cast. Maybe just a neutral grey is needed.

[bobbystahr]

To me, as a Martian(Scorpio ruled by Mars)coulorblind artist/tone deaf musician it still rocks(pun intended)...no slag on Ulco's observation as he has colour sense, hee hee hee

[TheBadger]

 

[Oshyan]

Very nice result, quite close to the reference. Is there specular/reflection used on any of your shaders? The primary, large-area reddish-brown looks a bit shiny or plastic somehow. In the reference it is indeed quite smooth, but also very matte, dusty basically. I think addressing that would take this right into photoreal.

- Oshyan

[fleetwood]

Update
There never was any specular reflection in any of the stones or surface but the crusty layer may have been too smooth. Made many small changes like tiny crust layer displacement, additional sands, modified the stones many times. I think I'm done with this approach for now- this is iteration 45 (the original post was iteration 30 .

[Dune]

Top!

[bobbystahr]

Still like it so not over tweaked. This is amongst the best stone work I've seen here...especially as it's a re creation of a "real life" situation....

[j meyer]

That's it ,well done!