I'm currently on the move and a bit stressed but I can upload an example material once everything is done.FakeShamus wrote:looks really good!
I'm wondering if you could explain the process a little for your rock and mountains, several of your pics have some real epic-feeling landscape.
Generally i'm using one and the same approach though be it a painted/blended photograph of a whole mountain for cam projection or a simple tiled rock texture spread across the mountain.
Obviously certain values and the amount of blends depends on the scene and light, but it comes down to the same approach more or less.
The procedure is:
- creating 3 copies of one and the same material
- low phong IOR, low exponent
- medium phong IOR, medium exponent
- high phong IOR, glossy exponent
- creating 2 bump/displacement maps. one of them has high fidelity detail, the other only big and rough features (I use Shader Map Pro)
- high fidelity bumps go into low and medium exponent materials
- low fidelity goes into high exponent
(depending on the texture I sometimes create a separate channel for displacements and bumps)
- creating 3 blend maps in PS, by color picking and choosing areas with a certain brightness
For example filling a selection of dark tones with white, inverse selection, fill rest with black.
Same goes for mid tones and bright tones.
- using the 3 blend maps from PS to blend inbetween the previously created materials with different phong and bump values.
That's pretty much it.
Also if the mountains are at different distance I use copies of the final shader and use higher displacement for further away ones and lower for closer up to match up the look of the features.
If the mountain is big and has lots of Z space, I use one final blend with low displacement and one with high and blend them with a gradient. So the area closer to the camera has appropriate displacement, while the far away peak at the top would need a lot more displacement.
I know it sounds very cumbersome, but with nature, where a lot of objects have an extreme varying specularity and saturation blending lots of them can bring dull materials to life.
Finally here's a new render. There is tons of geometry and SSS going on and unfortunately I did not bother enough to optimize the scene, so it did not converge as good as I thought after 17h of rendering.