Ever since I saw a random tutorial about sand on youtube I’ve been interested in generating sand dunes in an interesting way. Most of the tutorials on youtube uses a Voronoi noise and then displaces that noise with regular noise. While that does give a nice result, it does not feel “correct”.
Eventually I came across this video and this post. I was unable to create dunes that looked the way I wanted which is kinda like this. But my takeaway was that sand dunes should have a direction. Here are some failed attempts
The shape of your dune should like kinda like this 
Now I have three ideas of how to generate/create dunes in blender. The first one works well and the second and third are just ideas I’m gonna share to see if anyone can improve them.
First
Voronoi noise with a wave texture plugged into smoothness. It looks like this:
After generating the main dunes you can add some ripples.
Here is the final result.
Now the second and third methods as I wrote are just ideas to be explored.
Second
is through a cloth simulation. I’m not familiar with how the physics in Blender works but I get the impression that it’s not exactly the most developed part of Blender. I tried going through the documentation on the subject but I did not find it helpful. Anyway here is a screenshot:
Third
Geometry nodes. I’m terrible at it. I have managed to create the dune shape though. Here is the result:
I’ve been trying for like 1,5 months now and nothing has come of it. But I felt like I needed to share some of the results I have achieved even though is not in the form of a pretty rendered image of a desert landscape.
With that said how would you go about creating pretty sand dunes? Please share your results.
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