#4 -  More Terrain Materials + Landscape Features

This update focuses on the result of the final tiling materials I made for the landscape side of this project.

For the moment, a Cliff, Moss, and Snow material would round off the last of the materials needed.

The cliff material was the result of mixing two different input shapes, generated using warped voronoi noise at different scales, and fed into a tile sampler node, where some additional overlays were applied to give it a small amount of surface texture, and the same "paint strokes" layer seen in the materials from the last post.

I also added Distance-Based Tiling to my landscape shader, specifically for the cliffs. This means that the cliff texture tiles less at a distance, and tiles more when viewed up close.

The Moss material was a very simple combination of Black & White Spots maps at different scales, ran through a slope-blur node to make the result appear as splotches of colour, rather than lots of individual dots. Hopefully, it reads as "fuzzy", and not just as some kind of green slime.

The Snow was made similarly to the Moss, just being a combination of Cloud textures and Slope Blur nodes, with some subtle blues injected in the base colour. The roughness of the material also has some small pin-pricks of low roughness that give the material a slight sparkling effect at glancing angles, though I think I could have pushed this further.

With these materials in place, the result looked like this:

Also in this shot, you can see the result of some tweaking to the lighting and atmosphere, based on feedback I received from my lecturer and peers.

• I had a few comments about the mountain the background standing out too much, so I really pushed the atmospheric fog and the DoF to haze it out, and it made a huge difference.
• I also had some comments about the transition between the cliffs and the grass, so I changed some parameters to make that transition slightly less sharp, although I might be able to go a bit further with this.
• Impossible to picture, but I also made some of the wind panning effects less subtle, so in motion, those effects make much more of an impact.

I also applied my final materials to my placeholder rocks.

I created a tri-planar material function which projects tiling textures on each side of the object, regardless of its UVs. In addition, I added a World Aligned Blend, or Z-Up blend, to project moss (or snow, or potentially, anything) to the top of the rocks, regardless of their orientation in the world.

The result of this on the rocks looks like this:

I also applied this technique to the rocks (?) along the shoreline, which use tri-planar dirt, with grass projected on top. This helps it to blend into the landscape material.

As these meshes have a slight overhang, the grass was being projected around the flatter areas at the base of the mesh, which wasn't what I wanted.

To solve this, I masked out the grass based on the red channel of the object's vertex colours. This allowed me to paint out the areas that shouldn't have grass:

The transition between grass and dirt is a bit sharp right now, so I'll have to look into a solution for that.

Going forward, I need to get the water shader complete, and move on to replacing the terrible placeholder trees I currently have.

After that, I need to start work on the final version of the house, the actual focal point of the scene.