Texturing Advice Needed

[shauncarollo]

A new project I'm working on has me sweeping across a 1/2 mile ground plane (give or take) while simultaneously showing a section of layers of earth below this plane. I'm getting into modeling different surfaces for the corresponding layers of earth, and am wondering if there is an easier way to do this.

 

I am thinking of using Vray Clipper to obtain the section, while retaining the object materials, but I really need them to look as real as possible, and as the camera sweeps perpendicular to the cutting plane, it would need to show variations in the layers (think rolling hills/layers.)

 

Is there a better/easier way to do this with a single object and messing with a single material or multimat? Using Vray and I am not an expert in building materials at all. I've looked for procedural earth materials but haven't found anything very convincing. I almost do want it to not be a completely straight cut section, but to have some geometry/noise on the exposed face.

 

Looking to have an end result that looks similar to this, at a depth of around 60' that bottoms out at the water table:

 

Thanks guys

Edited July 11, 2014 by shauncarollo

[mikebart]

Have you used composite materials before?, you can layer materials on top of one another using masks, the interface is very similar to photoshop, you can even set blending modes for layers.

ill try and post an example of what I mean tomorrow, I had to do something quite similar a while back.

Edited July 12, 2014 by mikebart

[Corey Beaulieu]

I second the the composite material idea and would add the potential for a Distance Texture....

 

You could take a plane, shell it for your earth and then copy the plane and don't shell it. The un-shelled plane would then be your object to drive the what texture appears where based on your desired distance. Only reason to do this is that the "rolling hills" would maintain an even distance for the different texture types rather than having even straight lines or having to paint large masks.

[mikebart]

Hey Shaun,

 

Ill try and explain how I've used the composite materials for this sort of thing, and also a method I've used of rendering masks for terrain that you might find useful and is pretty easy to set up.

 

Composite Material:

Pretty much each map is like a .psd file, with layers, masks and blending modes. you can sort of make procedural textures using this method too if you use noise maps in the mask slot.

 

I've used 3 different rock textures of the same type of rock, so they were derived from the same photo source, each with their own reflect, gloss and normal maps, all 2048's.

 

Make sure each map and mask corresponds to each of the composite maps in the material, also its a good idea to instance your masks early on so for e.g, if you make changes to a noise map mask, you only have to change it once on the diffuse instead of going through all the other maps, reflect, gloss, normal, etc.

 

 

I've just thrown together a quick section of cliff as an example, this mesh has 2 UV channels on it, so UV channel 1 will handle all your rock and grass textures and you can control how much it tiles like you normally would.

 

UV Channel 2 covers the whole mesh like a light map, no overlap, so I'd imagine for what you want to do, this channel would cover all of your cliffs, and would probably require that you use the UVUnwrap modifier to pack all of your cliffs into one or two large maps. This channel will be used for masking for the grass or loose gravelly soil.

 

Making the Mask:

To generate the mask for the grass, place a directional light facing down, turn on overshoot so it has no bounds, and turn off shadows.

 

On the base material turn off all map slots except the normal map slot, make sure the diffuse colour is full white.

 

 

Add a vrayCompletemap to be rendered to texture, and this will be used as the mask for the grass or what ever you want to be the loose stuff falling down and sitting on the upper surfaces of the rock.

 

So as you can see the normal maps have been rendered into the image.

 

 

Once you've added the mask for the grass you can then have a play around with scaling UV channel 1 to get even more variation out of the rock.

 

heres the final result.

 

View Close up

 

Also if you use multiscatter or something, you can use the mask for vegetation distribution.

Edited July 13, 2014 by mikebart

[shauncarollo]

I didn't even think about a composite mask...DOH! That will work perfectly; even though it will require a ton of custom painting in PS, it should offer the look I'm going for. Thanks a ton.