Hello everyone. I’m trying to recreate a martian surface. I have a terrain and I have a ton of rocks on a particle system thats mapped to the terrain. My question is how can I texture this rock particle system to look like dirt and sand has piled up near the bottoms of rocks. Here is an example image.
Notice how the rocks sit in the sand and it affects the sand around them. Im also looking to get the part of the rock that is closer to the ground to have sand built up.
im going to use the term “material” now, but by material i mean anything that changes the look of the mesh, aka materials, textures, normal maps, specularity etc.
so, the way i would make this is first make a material for the rock, and try to exclude the sand on top of it. then i would make a material for the sand around the rocks, and then i would make another material for the sand covering the rocks. use a mask to determen what area of the rock that is covered with sand, and make the material simular enough that it looks a lot like the sand surrounding the rocks, but not exsactly the same. if you look closely the sand around the rocks is really rough and heavy, while the sand on the rocks is very fine, and light. almost like dust.
just experiment, and once you are stuck and have NO idea where to go next, post your progress and referance and then we can give you further suggestions on how to advnace your scene.
Sorry here is the scene in question. I can make a texture for the rocks but how can I make a texture for the particle system so that the particles position and rotation in relationship to the ground affects where the sand is. Is there any way to procedurally do that?
I’m not trying to match the reference it’s supposed to be dawn on Mars. I’m not looking for general critique I am trying to solve a specific issue I have with texturing the rock particle system.
What if you could use particles-rocks as a dynamic paint brush and slide them a bit to ‘paint’ area you’d need to add something else. Dynamic paint resulting image might have what you need to place or to texture paint later on.
Hmm would that mean I would need to apply the particles so that its no longer particles but an actual mesh?
No, here’s an example where icosphere is set as a particle system object. Plane which generates particles is animated - makes particles move along Y. Particles move, fall on Collision plane where they stop. While moving they leave traces on Canvas.
As another idea - maybe you could use baked shadow information to create mask for placing different materials.
you could try giving this to the stones and make “that other object” the surface. i haven’t took a look at it but it seems like that could work for you
