What is the best approach to texturing a large terrain object ?

Olo_Ordinaire

I've been tinkering with creating terrain for use in my renders.  My latest effort used dForce draping over various objects to create a cliff face, bluff, and some terrain beneath the cliff with a depression for a stream.  After dForce simulation, I exported the object and re-imported as an OBJ, and that all works fine.

I created some material zones with the geometry editor for the cliff face, terrain, bluff, etc, but when i tried flooding the surfaces with some of the ground and rock textures in my library, it looks like a patchwork quilt -- like a toy, and not usable at all.

How would a pro handle doing something like this ?  Below is a quickie render with no textures applied and a G8M character for scale:

Thanks,

Olo

Amaranth

You could study https://www.daz3d.com/terradome-3-iray

 

Richard Haseltine

Did you use tiling mterials, with normals (or bumps), and set their repeats reasonably high? Still, it is going to look odd where the "fabric" is bunched whatever you do without adjusting the mapping (or topology) and the ridges should probably be a bit different to the flat areas, to account for their elevation. Usign some Iray decals on top of the base material might help - they wouldn't be affected by scrunched-up UVs, but they would tend to shear on the steeply sloped sections.

AgitatedRiot

Is the surface selectable? Did you try rock shaders?

Jabba

Seamless textures can often still look patchy from a distance - procedural shaders are what you want.

For free...
https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-shader-lite

For a very reasonable price in my opinion (no, I'm not the vendor by the way, LOL)...
https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader

AgitatedRiot

Jabba said:

Seamless textures can often still look patchy from a distance - procedural shaders are what you want.

For free...
https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-shader-lite

For a very reasonable price in my opinion (no, I'm not the vendor by the way, LOL)...
https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader

Thank you. 

Jabba

Another good one that's also on sale...
https://www.daz3d.com/v176-iray-ground-textures-5

FirstBastion

I'd certainly agree with Jabba's suggestion of multi layer shader  ...
https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader

I'd also advise you to split the terrain ground model from the cliffs geometry.  Two separate models are always more manageable.

Togire

Not sure that is is completely adapted to a rocky terrain, but here is what do to avoid the checker board effect on a duplicated texture on a large surface for a grassy terrain.
If you just use the tiling texture duplication, the tiles will be clearly visible on the lawn.

So I create a patch (say 2-3m square), add to it some irregular large bumps (~3-4cm height) with a modeler or mesh grabber, texture it with a slightly different grass shader (or the same shader with a tone a bit lighter or darker), and I spread them over my lawn with  utltrascatter.
The base plane of the patches must be under the ground level, so that only part of the bumps are visible. In ultrascatter, I select to have a random placement of the patches, with a random rotation (to have visually different shapes of the bumps) and with a random vertical position (-1cm to -3cm) to have the bumps randomly more of less visible. A random scaling can also be used.

With ulstrascatter, it is very fast to do and very light in terms or resources as all is done with instances.
For a lawn, this creates random stains that completely breaks the texture tiling effect, and the final result is excellent. For a rocky terrain, maybe the bumps will be too visible, but it may be worth trying.

Olo_Ordinaire

Thanks, all, for the suggestions.  I've tinkered with tiling and reqular Iray ground shaders, but as Jabba mentioned, it still looks like a patchwork quilt.  In the example render, you can see a couple of places where there are different material zones, but there are actually 5 or 6, I think.

I will look into the multilayer shader thing -- I wasn't aware of those.

Olo

Drip

One thing that might also help, is mapping the UV of your model, and then shifting the vertices on the flat surfaces around a little bit, so the polygons or quads are no longer perfectly regular and straightened out. Don't re-map the UV after that. It should make repeat textures less obvious when they're twisted and stretched irregularly.