Alpine shader by using face normals and altitudes

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I have played around with cycles and created an alpine shader. The basic model is

  1. Stuff does not grow if the slope is to steep, or equivalently the z component of the normal vector is to small
  2. Different stuff grow on different altitudes
  3. Faces in one cardinal direction is colder. This is simulated by adding an offset to the input altitude when choosing material. The offset is the projection of the normal vector onto the cold direction. Thus, flat surfaces are not affected by this modulation.

Stuff here means one of snow, high altitude forest, and low altitude forest. What do you think about the result? The lake is not part of the shader, since I cannot simulate water flow through nodes.

alps.jpg1919×1279 196 KB

Attachments

alpine_shader.blend (2.99 MB)

2

IIRC, I think you can find slope using the absolute dot product of the normal and the up vector. In the case of blender, this would be |N.(0,0,1)| It’s something like that, though it’s been a while.