Canyon material using advanced procedurals and Vertex Colours
Hello and welcome to the third installment of my procedural tutorials. This will be a quite advanced tutorial since the final result will include a ton of layered procedurals, a vertex colour mask, some bitmap masks and a gradient ramp with LOTS of flags. This is what my version looks like, hopefully the end result of this tutorial will be somewhat similar (click the image for a larger version)
If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about when I say procedural, I suggest reading the help file that comes with 3dsmax. Or you can look through part one of this series, Procedural Wood and then proceed to tutorial number two, Anisotropic metal shader.
I will asume that you know what you're doing in the material editor in 3dsmax and that you don't need a number specific tutorials. Due to the complexity of this material, I won't be putting up images for every little dialog that pops up. I will however do my best to make it easy to follow my logic (what logic?).
One VERY important thing to remember when dealing with procedural maps is that size matters. The scale of your scene and the scale of my scene will most likely not be the same. Thus, a size of 10 for a noise map might look right in my scene, but be way too small or too big in your scene. I will put some scene specifics at the beginning of the tutorial. Another thing to remember is that the scale of the sphere in the material editor will of course affect the look of the material in the material preview. Which is another thing I will touch on.
Lastly, this material can be summed up in one sentence: you use vertex colours to specify where you want the mud, then you use two bitmaps and some cellular trickery to mask in the water between the cracks. That's the extremely short version of it. Now on to the long version.
Maps used
First of all, lets review what we'll be using for this shader.
- Noise map.
We will be putting this one to good use. I recommend downloading the Blur Noise map (avaliable from Maxplugins.de) because you can have level settings higher than 10. This is very good when you have a large size but you still want the fine detail. Regular noise works well too of course since pretty much everything but the number of avaliable levels is the same. One thing to take note of: the regular noise can be displayed in the viewport, blur noise can't.
- Cellular map.
This one is another very versatile map which will be used for the cracked mud.
- Mix map.
This map is impossible to do without. The ability to mix maps is essential to a good material.
- Composite map.
It does what it says. Composites different maps together, pretty much the same way layers work in Photoshop, but without the lovely opacity controls and blending modes. On a side note, there is a plugin in development that features just that, Photoshop style blending of maps. It can be picked up from Michael Spaw, the Max Plugin section.
- Falloff map.
The falloff map is another map that is incredibly useful. You can use it to fade between two colours or maps depending on light/shadow, perpendicularity to the camera etc etc. Read all about it in the documentation.
- Output map.
Another neat little map. This one will let you adjust the colour values, output ammount, offset and a bunch of other stuff. One of the most interesting uses, in this tutorial, is the Bump Ammount spinner. We will use it to tweak the different layers of the bump maps used. It has two siblings by the name of RGB Multiply and RGB Tint. They are geared towards colour correcting only though. Lastly, I must mention Color Correct by Cuneyt Ozdas which is like the output map on steroids. Visit that site for more must-have plugins.
- Raytrace map.
This is just to add reflections to the water. It's pretty darn slow when you mask it as we will be doing though, so you might want to find another solution (environment mapping for example) or render in passes.
- Electric map.
The Electric map blended with the Noise map gives a very nice bump map as I will be showing later. It's also handy for caustic effects in pools and on sea floors for example. Avaliable from Maxplugins.de.
- Solid Color map.
This is just what the name says. A solid colour map. If, for example you need a completely white material, this can give you that. And you have controlable alpha value too. Very simple, and pretty usefull now and then. Avaliable from Maxplugins.de.
When I started making the canyon material, I had in mind something with sediment layers, a rocky surface and a stream at the bottom. On either side of the stream there would be a band of cracked mud, with water snaking trough the cracks. Since I didn't plan on modeling the cracked mud, the snaking water would have to be part of the material and not a separate plane with a water material applied. A separate plane would've produced a very cg look because of the smooth intersection of water and canyon wall. I set off to find reference, and for some reason I can't find as nice refrences this time around. I found some really nice shots from Myst 3 - Exile and some other general images. I did a quick search for this tutorial and came up with this photo, an image from Myst 3 - Exile and another image from Exile. They aren't the best, but as I had a pretty clear idea when I started, I didn't really need much reference. Besides, I had an irc channel I could bug with updates. Co-workers, friends and irc are great ways to get feedback fast. Very much recommended.
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© Peter Åsberg 2003