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Help with Natural Ground Shaders

RowanRowan Posts: 4
edited December 1969 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hope someone here can help with this. I picked up the natural ground shaders for Daz Studio and wanted to use them to texture a ground plane, but I'm having some issues when applying them to a primitive plane. As far as I know the shaders are tileable and images used for the textures are pretty high resolution (3000x3000 I believe),so I would expect them to be sharp. This does not appear to be the case when applied to the primitive plane. Not sure what I'm doing wrong and couldn't find any clear documentation on the shaders or making the primitive plane in daz studio. Anyone have advice on setting up the primitive plane to act as a ground plane. I'm not sure on dimensions and divisions necessary, and how this affects the shader. Doing some trial renders it appears that having a small plane (10m) with a much higher number of divisions (100) appears to make the texture sharper, but is there a consensus on what these should be set to? Thanks.

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,843
    edited December 1969

    Divisions shouldn't matter, just work out how big each tiel should be, then divide that into the size of your plane to get the number of tiles you need. So if the texture has about 1 metre's worth of content you'd need to tile it ten times on a 10M plane (which would make each pixel about a third of a millimetre across).

  • RowanRowan Posts: 4
    edited December 1969

    Not sure if I understand the reply. Probably a dumb question, but how do I determine how much content is in the texture? Thanks for clarifying.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,843
    edited December 1969

    Look at the image and decide how big a piece off ground it would represent - looking at the repeat in the promos 1m doesn't seem an unreasonable guess.

  • RowanRowan Posts: 4
    edited December 1969

    I will give that a try. One more clarification, when you say tile do you mean divisions in the primitive creation panel (ie 10 m panel with 10 divisions) or do you mean individual planes (10 of 1m size)? Thanks.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,843
    edited December 1969

    No, I mean the horizontal and vertical tiles setting in the Surface pane that causes the texture to repeat over the surface.

  • RowanRowan Posts: 4
    edited December 1969

    Thanks. That worked well for the foreground. Any advice on creating a larger ground for more distant backgrounds to avoid noticeable tiling, (or texture sets that would work better than the natural ground shaders for this purpose)? The image I'm working on has the figures in the foreground, quite closeup (and your advice worked well to get these shaders to work on a 10m ground plane for the immediate area around the figures), but is outdoors so I need to figure out some method for the more distant background. Thanks again for all the help.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,843
    edited December 1969

    That's tricky. One thing you might try is using a plane with a very high titling value, which will of course show noticeable repeats, and then use another plane over that with a different repeat and a random opacity map (if you have Photoshop the Clouds filter would work, or you could roll your own in Shader Mixer instead of using the shader itself) so that you got a different repeat which would break up the obvious tiling. That's a theoretical answer, I haven't tried it here.

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