perfect normal for sand beach

NAIMA

Hello I am struggling to make and find a good level of detail and how to make a decent sand for Crysis , I want to make at least 2 types of sand :

underwater , smoothed on the shore and messy with walksteps all around with small dunes on the back of shore , but I cant find a way to make a good normal map , can anyone suggest me how to do ? like can I get a really good level of detail when I cam in to see for example a realistic grain effect? and also with this get the little dunes stand out ? the one I did instead seems to be like a strange reflecting thing.....

http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/2963/72125408.jpg

Eric Chadwick

The trick I like for ground textures is to use a detailmap for the up-close detail, but let the main texture handle the medium-distance.

I would also take a good hard look at what they did in Crysis with their textures.

NAIMA

Can u explain what you mean with a sample? I was also thinking like make a very grainynoisy normal map with overinposed small dunes normal map more or less following the texture but I dunno how to do that thing ....

Farfarer

For sand, I found that getting a 50% grey layer and adding some very slight noise to it then overlaying it on a larger detail normal map gave a nice sand grain effect. The benefit is that each pixel represents a different facet (rather than baking or converting from a height map, as that anti-alises the pixels together).

However, you need to ensure that it's not set to monochromatic (so it's coloured noise, meaning alters the normal of each pixel in every direction by a small amount) and you need to ensure that the effect is reeeaaally subtle - tone down the opacity of the noise layer by a good amount (otherwise you just get an expanse of fuzzy nonsense). With a good spec map, it can nicely sell the effect of tiny grains of sand.

NAIMA

Seems interesting procedure I'll try that , I guess u refer to the normal only but How about the specular map?

Farfarer

Essentially just low-opacity noise over a larger scale pattern, with a few flecks of much brighter sparkles. Kinda like skin specular.

NAIMA

Mmm not sure I understod weell , can u post me a sample of what umean?

I shoudl so have 3 maps?

diffuse ( sand texture )
normal ( made like u described)
specular ( gray low noise? )

carlo_c

Yeah you should have 3 maps like you have said

Eric Chadwick

Here are some samples of what I meant by Detail Map.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Detail_Map

A detail map gives you better up-close detail than a regular tiled map, because it can be tiled like crazy for much smaller pixels. It fades out at a medium distance to a larger texture to hide the tiling artifacts.

NAIMA

So actually in the crysis terrain mmaterial I shoul duse 4 textures?

diffuse , normal m detail and specular?

is there any sample of this , for any kind of texture , to understand how each should look like?

Eric Chadwick

They have a little bit of info in the CryEngine2 manual, but not much.
http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/frames.html?frmname=topic&frmfile=MaterialEditorRef.html

I would just load up one of their levels and examine their terrain. We were looking into licensing CryEngine a few months ago, and the CryEngine2 editor could load Crysis Wars levels, so that was an easy way to dissect what they did. But now CryEngine3 is available so I'd suggest looking into that too.

NAIMA

Also another problem I am having is how I can make a decent bump/normal in order to give the right feel of up and down little dunes of sand? So far this is the best effect I coul dget but It fees flat .....

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/5102/37772783.jpg

Eric Chadwick

Are you working from photo reference? Essential to get good results.

Are you painting a gray bump map and converting it to a normalmap in Photoshop? I would try sculpting this in Zbrush or Mudbox or 3DCoat, for more depth. Or you can try overlaying the map on top of itself in Photoshop to strengthen the slopes.

I see the pattern repeating itself in the left shot. This is fixable if you use a detail map, because then your big footprints-in-sand texture can be cover more area (be tiled less), and the detail map handles all the up-close graininess you want for the sand.

NAIMA

i HAND PAINTED a gray pattern for a up and down beach little dunes , then in Crysis I placed my shaded plain noised sand texture , with this bump normal over in the bump position , plus I added a noise normal for grain sand in the decal position and tiled at 5 .....
here is the result , how looks?

Can it be improved?

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/5164/96801826.jpg

NAIMA

if I could make with Zbrush I would but I have no idea how ....

MrMachete

I think instead of using a grey pattern, try a dark brownish colour, but it looks good for what you've got so far.

Eric Chadwick

I think it looks great! Good job.

NAIMA

Ok here is the Sample , I would really like to get your opinions on that , my goal is to reach the most realistic possible effect ....

This image is a mix of my tree in game blended textures , I made a huge work behind that , but Let me know what you think sincerely please...

The time of the day is modeled after the Crysis one and is 8 AM....






Texture Types are , small dunes , Human steps and Wet smoothed....

Eric Chadwick

Frankly this looks very flat and boring. This is vertex blending, right? That gives very soft blends, which make it look more bland. As teaandcigarettes said in the other thread, you need to add some covering decals and decorative meshes, to hide the blandness of the transitions.

Do you have reference photos of the kind of beach you're trying to achieve? I mean photos of real beaches, not screenshots from a game.

NAIMA

Hi yes , this si just a test of blending the texture together , I tought to use the smoothed one close to the sea side , where the waves wash the shore , the human stepped ones to mix on this flat one and the more dune one on the back toward the interior of island or beach .. eventually I wanted to add some scattered items like shells , small roots etc and colore mix the three types to create a diversity shore with different tones .... but here I just wanted to see ifit looks realistic as blending and texture / normals....