Indiana Jones - Rocky material help needed

Hey folks!

I’m trying to recreate a rocky material from the Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, but I’m unable to come close to it. I’ve never really faced issues recreating materials, but this one is one hell of a PITA!

Here’s what I’m trying to replicate:


You can take a better look at the reference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC1ikwQ5Zgc&t=53s

And bellow are some of my results:



How would you go on about creating such material?
(BTW, the grooves/carving isn’t needed, only the rock material itself)

Thanks

Your own tries look pretty good, I would say!

A simple, kinda even rock material like this can be solved procedurally with voronoi, a noise on the vector line with a mix rgb, maybe a noise and a musgrave for a different kind of grainy look.
I advise you to check for procedural rock materials on youtube (IMO no real displacement is necessary for this, you can use micro displacement, but a clever bump can do the trick).

I’m happy to do some setups and share here, I just don’t have time now, but a bit later today, I might be able to do it! :blush:

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Your results already seem pretty close. It seems that the material in the reference has a bit less roughness and more micro-height variations.

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Hi there,

Here are an example. Not very refined, just popped it together, but it gives you the idea.

You should start with the broader chunks of rocks, then add smaller details. The bump can get grainy if you plug them all together at once, so I did it gradually.

The colour, however is the other way around: the definitive color ranges can feel unreal, like cartoonish, so a higher roughness in that regard might be better. Choosing the right colours is also crucial.
Open up any picture you like in image editor, next to the nodes. Hover your mouse over the BW color line of the colour ramp, hit E, then go over to the image, hold left and drag mouse over to pick the colours, and repeat until you like it.

It needs more tweaking, just wanted to quickly show you, how easy you can achieve relatively good results (IMO) in no time, even without displacement.
You can use the same textures for displacement of course, but it might need some toning in the BW range, like using a Square Root math node, or a smooth maximum, etc…



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Hey! Sorry for the late reply.
That’s awesome! Looks great.

Can I ask you a favor? Could you upload that to somewhere? xD
Because there are some nodes that I can’t really see what’s going on, like some of the color ramps.

Thanks!

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I am happy to share but I will tweak it a bit more. This evening I will have some time! See you! :blush:

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