Martian environment (updated)

[Antoine]

I wanted to try to recreate some martian ground and atmosphere.

David

[Kadri]

I like it.

[Oshyan]

Very nice! Good variety of stone sizes and ground texture (especially in the background). Perhaps more of a "dusty" look in some parts? It can be hard to achieve, I know.

- Oshyan

[AP]

Indeed, dust and i would add some scattered broken strata here and there. The colors are very nice as with the atmospherics.

[Dune]

Very nice. It strikes me that the underside of the stones have the base grey color, and only the tops the ground reds. Is that on purpose? Did you use smooth in the surface layer containing the stones?

[Hannes]

Very convincing. Great terrain and rocks.

[mhaze]

Good stuff - could well be a shot taken on Mars!

[Antoine]

Thank you for your comments !

It strikes me that the underside of the stones have the base grey color, and only the tops the ground reds

Yes I saw this problem and I didn't use the smooth option, I really don't know how to solve that problem, apart from choosing "all" instead of "highest (raise)" in the choose by altitude of the merge node, but the result then is not what I want. So really I don't know what to do.
If someone has the solution It would be great.

David

[fleetwood]

I had a similar problem recently where color was not appearing on lower, more sloped parts of stones and it was due to a particular Slope key setting.

If you have set a maximum slope angle to limit the stone layer to flatter areas of the terrain, the Slope key used may actually end up applying to each individual stone so only the low angled upper parts of the stone receive the color.

You could try a little crop test using each different Slope key (Final normal, Terrain, or Planet/object normal)  and see if one of them corrects the problem. 



Example : two renders - exactly the same scene, except for using two different Slope key choices in the stone distribution shader.

[Dune]

Yes, angle. But using the smoothing option in the surface layer often gives better results in this respect, but is not always possible. You could try adding a 'texture coordinates from XYZ' before the stones.

[Antoine]

Thank you Fleetwood and Dune !
Indeed changing the slope key setting solved the problem.

Here is an update, Also I have changed the sand color and its distribution. I hope it looks better now.

David

[Antoine]

Another render with the sun in front.

[archonforest]

The earlier render looks better with the sun. The sun in front make the picture kinda flat. I liked those big shadows on the earlier one.
Some stones looking weird imho. Like half colored? Hmm...

[inkydigit]

Looks good so far, interested to see where this goes next...

[AP]

Definitely keep the sun off to the sides.