Texturing a forest, too... Help, please!

[MSB]

well the best way to start to look to TONS of refernce images which mean forest ,rocks,grass,dirt images and think how to paint them or use them directly in your software

[Six60Sicks]

You could make a layered shader for the ground cover. I have used a procedural texture as the bottom layer of dirt, then used that in a layered shader with a mossy moldy layer, a dead leaf layer, and whatever else your type of forest has. Then I added small amounts of PaintFX here and there, not as ground cover, but slight additions to take the focus of the ground completly. Also using large rocks and big plants can allow your ground to show through only in small amounts. Hope this helps, or atleast gets you ideas flowing.

[shirak23]

Thanks for the tips. I'm new to layered shaders, though. When you said you had a moss and leaf layer, are those layers basically images of leaves with an alpha channel? How do you separate them enough to look distinct and not just a jumbled mess? Any tutorials you can suggest? Or can you give me a more detailed explanation? Any help would be great! Thanks!

[Six60Sicks]

The moss layer, which is on top of the dirt layer, has either a displacement or simply a bump map to give it some depth and appear to sit on top of the dirt. Sometimes for leaves I will duplicate my ground mesh and place my leaves with alpha on that duplicated surface. Then I will raise parts of that mesh slightly(at vertex level or with sculpt tool) to be above the dirt and moss mesh. Is this clear? I can try to do a better job explaining this if you need.

[Pixero]

I have two tutorials on how to texture terrain based on slope on my site.
One with standard Maya shaders and one for my own JS_Incidence Mentalray shader.
www.pixero.com (http://www.pixero.com) tutorial section.

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