dry and cracked earth

[skippa]

looks like i have to pull me out of this by myself. but that's fine - i can do this.

anyway, i have tried several things and i think i finally found what i need. the first approach was a displacement map with a picture of a desert in top view as reference. at the first glance it looked quite nice and i just thought i got it, but my second glance wasn't that satisfied. the cracks were too distorted to work with them. i need very clear defined cracks because there will be water running between them and so i decided to throw the whole "displacement map" concept away. i then came up with a complete different approach. it is little more time intensive but the final result looked much better and suited my requirements most. so here's what i've done: i modeled only a little plane with just a few cracks on it (about 8 to 10) and made each border of my 4 sided plane so that it can be tiled together with it's opposite neighbour - just like a tile map. the result is a desert which can be infinitely enlarged :buttrock:

maybe someone has a better procedure, if so, please just let me know.

lowbrow

[Ian Jones]

sounds like a good strategy to me. Displacement wouldnt be a good option in the case of water running between the cracks due to the fact that its a render time process and you'd lack the geometry for water animation.

I'd suggest casting a modifier of some sort like 'random noise' type of mesh distortion to break up some of the regularity of the tiling on the overall merged mesh.

[skippa]

hm, i'll give it a try. adding some ditches and hills has also made a good job. if i have a useable result i'll post a test-rendering.

[RagingBull]

I would like to see a couple of WIP pic's if you have the time to upload some ?

[lostboy]

I never tried this, but could it be possible, if you were modeling it, make a large plane of polys, shaping the polys to your liking, then just bevel everything up with one swift move??

[lostboy]

this took me about 5 minutes, probably could take you less. Since I try to work in quads(don;t know if it is necessary for something like this) I basically made four side polygons by using the knife tool and cutting into a flat box(you could basically divide the box with whatever method you prefer). Then I just arranged points to mimic nature, then select all polys and bevel. I also had to use the move tool to move up the beveled polys to the desired height.
On the right side of the picture, I used the knife tool again to make multi-sided pieces of earth, incase four sides are too little.

in any case, I hope you get the results you want.

[Tad]

displacement map dude

[gxsaurav]

using paint deformation tool in 3d max can do the job? with low brush size

[RagingBull]

Tad:

Did you read what he said he was going to be doing with it ???

I think he's chosen the best way to do it anyway, so I'd like to see what his final render looks like.

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