mossy rock

Captain’s log, stardate 41254.7

For past few days have been doing this test of nature scene in blender. And have found this software extremely joyful to work with, despite my recent post in some other thread. I owe blender and BF an apologie.

So this seems to be a wet mossy rock. It’s an early wip. Shaders and lighting needs some tweaking. Also need to do some other rocks with some moss, ground, bits of rain, some bg (maybe picture), and of course final color correction. Knowing what is already done, rest should not be very hard.

Can’t promise daily updates, currently have some projects to work on, but will try to work on this in my spare time. (of course after watching few star trek episodes)

more info on the image: everything is done in blender, rendering in cycles GPU.

latest update:


nice man, really realistic

looks really good, man. nice.

After some break have looked at pics and realized that the moss seems very dead. Decided to give some life.

thanx guys, more to come

link for unregistered users (I remember how annoying it was to not be able to see attachments)

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Wow, what a different the green makes! As you’ve said, the moss goes from looking dead to positively vibrant! It has a great wet look, too, I can practically smell the moisture!

If you decide to try different rock shapes, Gleb Alexandrov has a tutorial on creating fairly convincing shapes using displacement (along with a lot of other cool tutorials on his channel):

The rock is looking very good, can’t wait to see how the scene develops.

update

Added few more rocks, and some rain (composite) to justify rock wetness. Side moss might need some details, seems a bit too even (maybe not). And need to add some more details, leaves, grass.


100 samples ~8 min. See hi-res version (few clicks on thumb :eyebrowlift:)

James, thanks for that tutorial. But I’m more with sculpting, and then adding fine details with displace. It gives more control.

Feel free to critique.

edit: just realized lighting is too even, need some shadows from environment

Very nice sir! Will follow this one.

Very cool! The moss looks amazing. Is it a particle system? Perhaps I’ll make a nature scene myself, and it would be great if you’d share some info about the moss.

The stone is too glossy I think. It looks as if the moss grows on some kind of zinc ore :slight_smile:
Still lovely!
Cheers!

@lech. yeah, while i like the way it is now, i think i just got used to it. So i think its worth trying to lower the reflection. A bit :slight_smile:

Moss is a hair particle system with textured density and height. had to do lots of tests and tweaks for it to seem real enough. Hair is rendered as line segments. While its a bit slower than triangle hair, it needs less memory. With limited gpu memory it is crucial. Shading uses two hair bsdfs, reflection and transmittance, with glossy bsdf added to it. Wetness mainly achieved through unusually high reflection and a little trick imitating subsurface scattering, as current SSS shader does not work on gpu, and even if he’d worked it would still be much slower than my current solution. Maybe later i could show some nodes screens.

BlackRaibow, thanks for the info! I’ll try it then in my project :slight_smile:

Really good job.

Looking awesome.

some moss has a soft velvet like look(lit edges) -maybe mix some velvet shader or fresnel ramp

Wah, nice. Is the moss made with a hair system ? Ah yes, nevermind, I didn’t see your post. Really convincing image.

The moss is excellent (as is the rock)! Can you give us a bit more information about how you set managed to get the moss to look like that? What is textured density and height, and how does it work?

BlackRainbow, really nice and very convincing moss, you can almost touch it.

BTW I’m just having a guess here…USS Enterprise-E :wink:

Hi guys. I’m glad you like it. But the project is far from being done.

Little info on the project itself. It has two shots, this one being first. Another one is more large scale, trees, grass and e.t.c.
Both shots have CG integrated in live action. I had no particular time constraints and was working on it on my spare time. So I decided to give blender a shot on this project.

So this is recent update


Foot and background is live action. Rocks and moss - obviously CG

Foot is live action with masked transparency projected into simple geometry in the scene as an emission texture - for camera rays, and diffuse black shader for non camera rays.

Moss consists of 3 hair particle systems on central rock, each of them having separate textures for density and length. (had spent some time figuring out how to assign separate textures for each hair part-system) Other rocks have just 1 hair part-system with density controlled by vertex groups.


I have to correct myself. At one point I was using two hair bsdfs, but it did not give desired wet moss look. So later decided to use this kind of setup:


Still WIP and lot to be done.

And these are some textures controlling moss density



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@tommy1441 Yes, right now on TNG. But I like all series in franchise. But latest JJ abrams movies are not my favorites. Just for popcorn… Don’t get me wrong, CG there is on top.

LOL, I agree with you…I’m more of the original and/or Voyager (can’t keep my eyes away from 7 of 9 :evilgrin:)

Anyways, it’s really coming together with the boot in the scene, although there’s something that is bothering me a bit, if the back of the leg/boot is in shadow, why isn’t there some sort of shadow in the rock? Don’t know if you have planned to add it before the final render.