Realistic Ground
Serene Night
Posts: 17,560
in The Commons
I do a lot of renders from the top down, or at angles and I find the ground often can be less realistic, pixelated or repetitive looking in the environments I buy. The best I've come up with to use are shaders for Iray but I would like to avoid the repetitive pattern look.
I'm looking for recommendations on sets that have good ground planes or layouts that can be used independent of the rest of the environment.
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...the ones that bother me are those which look like someone either laid a piece of Plexiglas on top or stretched a big sheet of cling wrap tightly over them flattening everything down.
I was trying a product called Foreground Blends. It does make grass blades that are three-dimensional. But I found it hard to work with because it only shows up in the final render, not the preview. And the dForce simulation made my grass explode.
https://www.daz3d.com/foreground-blends
Stonemason sets use masks so are not so repetitive
you could possibly swap the masks and textures out with your own in the shaders
-Make sure the ground isn't perfectly flat
-Make sure there's some shadows and highlights to break the pattern
-Export the ground object to blender, and change the UV in such a way that it no longer resembles the mesh (but is still seamless). (I actually haven't managed to import a custom UV into DAZ yet, but this is something I once managed to do elsewhere.). Change the tiling for the texture into something different, preferably something with a random fraction. Effectively, the ground texture should stretch and squeeze across the surface, making it appear less repetitive.
If it's just dirt ground you are wanting you can use Will Timmon's (Oso3D)'s Procedural shaders on ShareCG.com called WTP3. Use the sand or beach ones I find good. Haven't used the others much or at all yet. You can change the color(s) of the sand(s) to make it red clay, black humus, brown humus & red clay, white clay, lots of types of dirt.
I find that it helps sometimes to significantly increase bump, try 10 or 20.
To avoid repetition, your best bet will always be procedural shaders, but a good second best is, as Wendy pointed out, the use of masks so the combined patterns result in a much harder to spot repetition. The standar Iray Uber already provides masking functionality for the diffuse overlay (and you can set the tiling manually in the image editor => instance tiling), but there are shaders dedicated to this, like this one or this one, even if it is a bit annoying when you need to manually input almost everything and they don't provide masks of their own, not to mention you could partially replicate the effect with a geoshell with an opacity map (there were a few shaders in 3Delight that procedurally mixed the textures, but it seems no one has managed to do the same in iray). You could also use this dirt shader to add some variety over any given texture, but I think it didn't work for animation (not sure at the moment). Lastly, you could always use the Terradome 3 or Ultrascenery terrain shaders and manually input your own textures--they both blend textures according to terrain angle (or elevation), so they are useless on a flat plane, but should solve many issues on something with enough geometry.
I have used this shader with good effect, although there's a learning curve. https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader
Also, if you apply a ground shader to your landscape and then add a geoshell with a different ground shader + an opacity map, you can break up obvious tiling.
Well I was just workin on a scene that uses so I thought I'd mention my favorite method - manually instancing a bunch
all the foreground is is a few lowish poly grass props. its a similar concept to the forground blends set by esha (just way more manual)
I mostly use https://www.daz3d.com/simply-grass-the-rough-stuff and whatever else I have floating in my runtime (if you have any outdoor sets odds are you'll have plenty of options to kitbash, you can also instance craploads of rocks or whatever you feel like)
Its a pretty manual method, but the end results are worth it imo
You also don't have to go all out - its also good in conjunction with a good ground shader or whatever. you can space them sporatically to break up repitition
I am working on a set that will hopefully help with this.
You may try and make some normal maps out of the ground textures, you can do this with a nifty little freeware program called: Materialized...