Hello! I couldn’t find anywhere online that really helped so I’ve come here 
Basically I really like mountains, and I feel comfortable in modelling mountains, but I can’t seem to figure out how to make a realistic material for a mountain. I’ve tried a bunch of different tutorials, but most are outdated or not realistic or maybe just not what I’m looking for. Originally I was trying to make snowy mountains but advice on any other sorts of mountains is very much appreciated.
Thanks!
Welcome! I hear you. This is probably not the answer you were looking for, but there’s an addon that I use called True Terrain that yields some very striking results.
I’m not sure if I’d be able to buy that but looking at the images it does look very awesome
One of the things that makes it look so awesome is adaptive subdivision + displacement. You could do the same thing yourself manually but it would probably take some time. Or if you have a good computer you could just massively subdivide your whole mesh. You might also look into what sorts f height maps are available. I know there are a lot
thanks! I’ll look into that
The old school, and free method, is separating the steep parts from the flat parts with a couple nodes like so:
You can adjust the color ramp to change the angles, and you can plug it into a mix shader node, or a mixRGB node with texture maps or some procedural voronoi/noise/musgrave or whatever.
The same scene but with two texture maps plugged in.
those look great! I’m having some trouble though and I think maybe I am doing something wrong with the modelling or something, because with the same node setup I got this result which looks a lot different:
I’m sure that my lighting is a lot different since I just did this really quickly but I feel like there’s something else I’m missing?
It may have to do with the difference in mesh density and detail. My setup had pretty high subdivisions and was using a very nice displacement map for the base geometry outside of the nodes setup. You may also want to crank the black further up on the color ramp to remove the soft edges a bit, or if you want to keep the ratio the same, move the white closer to it.
For lighting, I was using cycles, and the default sky texture node with Nishita selected. (which is currently the default, does not work in Eevee though)
World Machine + adaptive subdivision = 
do you know any good tutorials I could watch or look at for making such a nice mountain model as you have made?
Have you tried using A.N.T.? It’s a bundled add-on. You just have to enable it in preferences.
I have tried it, what sorts of settings do you use?
Check out the presets. There’s one very similar to the one you liked. You can change the random seed and other settings from there. Check the pop-up menu in the lower left. ( the one that appears when you transform etc. )
Thank you so much! I’ve been able to get this result after some subdividing and messing with textures, I think it is a very big improvement! if you have any tips on how to make this one look better that would be appreciated, overall I think this a big leap in my mountain making journey (p.s. sorry for the terrible image quality I didn’t want to wait hours for it to finish rendering haha)
