Gradient Ramps are fairly powerful - clouds and landscape

[SgWRX]

Some time ago I read an old discussion of a procedure to get somewhat decent clouds with MR sun/sky. This specific discussion can be credited to Ted Boardman, though I'm not sure if it was he who posted it. I believe Zap has discussed this also. Probably others too...

 

Anyway, the technique was put a gradient ramp into the haze slot of the mr physical sky. Rotate the gradient ramp 90 deg, set the environment mapping to spherical and increase the output to be visible. Then in the middle flag of the gradient ramp, edit the properties and put in a noise map. Put the noise size down to .01 or something etc... and play with the settings to get some cloud coverage. To me, this works especially well if you want to have some clouds to the sky but have those clouds be subtle so as not to overwhelm the rest of the image.

 

Anyway, I've been playing with it and like it. I wondered how this whole map in the flag thing works so I did a test scene. I setup a simple square plane. My material was an standard MR arch & design with a gradient ramp in the diffuse map slot. I then added an actual bitmap (some grass bitmap i created) in the very 1st flag on the right. Added a noise map to the center flag, then added the same grass bitmap to 3rd flag on the left. I switched the noise map to fractal with 3 levels, and changed the white to be a dark brown. My plane then had a gradient from grass on both sides to this "dirt" in the middle. To get a sharper or steeper transition between the grass and the "dirt road", I ended up have left to right: flag 1 grass, flag 2 grass, flag 3 noise, flag 4 noise, flag 5 grass, flag 6 grass. Then playing with the flag positions I could move where the dirt road was.

 

I do recall a pretty extensive tutorial online somewhere that used a similar technique for creating layered muddy canyon walls.

 

anyway, pretty neat.