3Ds Max Ground Materials

Blisterman

Does anyone know how to create, or have any good bump maps for creating a realistic looking natural dirt ground, for a scene I'm working on. It's covering a large area from the foreground to the background.

All the maps I find on the internet end up creating a pattern effect, which I'm obviously trying to avoid.

Danbo!

Hmmm, theyre tough to find alright. The attached is almost seamless, but over a large area you will see a slight pattern effect.

What I will sometimes do is use a bump map, and add a displacement map that is maybe 4x the size of the bump, but with a very very low value. This will add to the inconsistency of gravel and can usually hide the patterns.

Also, make sure you get this material pack if you havent got it already, very handy especially for arch projects...

http://www.editingarchive.com/view.php?ID=410

Blisterman

Cheers, I'll have to give that bump map suggestion a go.
Does that work with grass textures as well? They're probably the worst for tiling.

Danbo!

I tend to avoid bump maps for anything other than brick coursings and roof tiles.

For grass I use displacement maps, they actually change the geometry rather than light effects, so even over a large area it doesnt look flat when further away.

The displacement map below is great for grass, and works with Vray. I've never used mental ray or scanline displacement so have no experience there, but I dont see why it wouldnt work. I presume its a matter of playing with displace values. In Vray, if you resize the UVW map of an object, you have to play with the displace values again afterwards, its all trial and error (for me anyway, only recently learnt about displacement)

http://www.cgdigest.com/material-settings/grass-tutorial/grassdisplace.jpg

The link is actually broken for me, site may be down. Im not at my home computer at the minute, but I have the file and can attach it here if the site is gone.

Anyway, heres an example of it in use....

red_ice

use noise - it works on sooooo many levels.

if your stuck for noise. Simply go to photoshop, make a big ass pallet, create new layer, fill it with black or white. Apply noise filter. Use that as a bump map. But max already has a noise texture which is perfect and completely seemless. I've used it for carpet many a time.

Very handy indeed.

InTheTrees

It can depend on how large an area you have to cover but a custom large texture with corresponding bump map would be good. That way you can paint in detail and even add simple shading into the map.

Also try a Blend material. You can use a greyscale mask to blend between two materials (ie. thick grass and thin grass).

docdolittle

One of the best sites for textures is http://cgtextures.com/ I use it a fair bit, but Max has a fair few built in textures that work really well in most cases, but some take a long time to render....

If you create your own from a texture on the net, http://www.crazybump.com/ if fairly easy to make normal maps with and tweek them to get them right.