What different methods would you suggest to model sand? My goal is toonish sand, mainly vagabonding dunes in the dezert, but it would be nice to discuss the theme from different viewpoints too. How to put in the granulaty in the view, and does the ocean tutorial count for creating the dunes too? (They are quite a bit slower, but same kind of waves anyway?)
I have this 2D picture, which I call “sand”, but does it go somehow 3D?
Stucci (procedural pattern) looks like grainy sand when you make its noise size small enough (0.001) and have it influence the NOR of your texture.
Il my thread below, you will find a blend file including a terrain with sand material :
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=159680
I have also written a tutorials about creating foot prints in the sand :
http://3d-synthesis.com/Displacement_Tutorial.html
I hope you’ll find them useful.
To model dunes, subdivide your terrain mesh enough.
Select at random, say… 4% of the vertices and with the Proportional tool edition enabled (O key), move the vertices upward. Adjust the influence radius of the tool with mouse wheel.
Try with different influence shapes for the proportional editing.
Then, select at random 4% of the vertices one more time and this time move them downward,with a larger influence radius.
You should get nice dunes, with some tweaking.