General info First of all, in my canyon scene, you can fit a sphere with a 65 unit radius between the canyon walls. The material editor 3d Map Sample Scale is set to 25 (it's in the options dialog). This will affect how large the procedural maps will appear in the material preview, and it will be one reason that your maps might not look the same as the screenshots. I also cheated somewhat with the uv-mapping of the walls and the vertex painting. I applied a uvw modifier, collapsed the stack and then edited the geometry to get the sediments to be even more wavy than they actually are. You don't have to do this, but it helps. For the vertex painting, the higher resolution mesh, the smoother the vertex colouring. I started to paint the general outline of the stream, then I applied a meshsmooth (1 iteration) and painted on top of that to get more detail. You could keep doing this, but the end result will be a fairly heavy mesh, and it's not always worth it. The colour map Lets start with the colour map (aka diffuse map). It will need one layer with sediment, a gradient ramp with a bunch of colours jammed together. Then there is the mud layer, and some general splotches of colour to top it all off. The water will be the last, and trickiest, layer. Here's a screenshot of the completed diffuse tree including the water. Please note the naming of materials. VERY IMPORTANT. When I did this material I didn't name a single map, and it's taken me quite a while to sort it all out :) Below is a render of the diffuse map with a vertex colour mask. Looks boring without the bump map... How the f...? Start by putting a Composite material, with two map slots, in the diffuse slot. The first one will be the canyon wall and mud diffuse, the second will be used for water. I will say this one last time, name the maps so you can easily navigate the material tree later on. Right, the Composite map will be called "Diffuse - Main Composite". Put a Mix map in slot one, this will be used to mix the mud and canyon wall diffuse maps with a Vertex Colour map. Put a Cellular map in the first mix slot and adjust the values accordingly, then put Noise maps in the colour slot and the first division slot. This is to give the mud more variation. On to the canyon wall. The canyon wall map is a mix between a Gradient Ramp and an Electric map. Put a Mix map in the slot below the mud to begin with. Name it "canyon wall diffuse mix" (or "blah" :) In the first slot you put the Gradient Ramp, name it "sediment lines". Here comes one of the tedious parts: creating the sediment lines by adding a bunch of flags and giving them slightly different colour. Just click in the gradient some 10-20 times, then right click a flag, chose properties. Then you can just use the arrows in that window to jump from flag to flag, adjust the position, and the colour without having to select each flag individually. This is also where canyon reference comes in handy, so you can get a general idea of how the sediment lines look. Displaying the map in the viewport is a good way to get feedback on how thick the bands are and how much the noise is affecting it. The reason I have a 1.7 tile on the gradient ramp is that I uv mapped the canyon very sloppily, and that it's easier to edit the gradient ramp when it's tiled. You don't have to have as many flags to get thin stripes. In the second slot we dump an Electric map, the "general splotch" map. This is just to get some general colour splotches on top of the sediment layer. The mix value I used is around 35. Not too strong, or the colour of the sediments will be all but lost. Back up one level to the "canyon wall diffuse mix". This is a neat little trick: put a Vertex Colour Map in the mix amount slot. This will let you use the nice little vertex colour map you painted (or will paint) as a mask. That's how I did the smiley face on the sphere, just slap a Vertex Paint modifier on the sphere, start drawing and you're set. Very handy in other cases too, for example painting dirt, shadows etc. Be creative! Here's a screenshot of the canyon and mud mix map. I'm going to discuss the water map last of all, because it will use a lot of map instancing from the bump map for use as masks and some bitmap trickery. Which means, we move on to the bump map. Previous|Next © Peter Åsberg 2003