sandscape
 

hi there

i´m working on a model that is an ice stadium which is filled with tons of sand for the summer to become some sort of bazaar/beach party area. i haven' worked a lot with maya and this is my first time texturing. i have made a texture with photoshop and projected it on the surface. then i made another file filled simply with "noise" for bumpmapping. but as you can see below, the result is not satisfying. i'd rather like to have it look like here: http://www.3du.de/maya2.htm
i suppose it does not look that "grainy" cause the bump map
is kinda "stretched" over the whole surface. now how can i achieve a likewise result. or is there even a better way to make a surface look sandy(i'm using maya 6)?can it all be done with particles?my pc is quite old.
btw:bumpmapping is only shown using hardware rendering,
isn't it?on the picture,the lower part is without, the upper part with bumpmapping.

im having difficulty understanding whats going on in the image. what kinda of projection did you use?

hi
i made a lambert shader.then mapped a "file" to the colour channel with "as projection" checked at the "create render notes". then loaded the texture at the projection tab.
same with the "noised" image at the bumpmap channel.looks like this in the hypershade:

from the texture warping think its a UV issue, 1. use normal instead of projection and 2. for this model try create uvs>automatic mapping and see what you get.

thanks for your reply GecT.
with normal instead of as projection it looks like this.not very grainy either. btw never mind the dark areas. this is where i used the sculpt polygon tool. although these parts should neither look like that i guess. where can i find this "automatic mapping "function?

the separate "create uvs" menu is new in 2008, if i recall correctly the uv related stuff was under edit polygons or the menu right next to it, something like that.

Just use planar mapping (prob. over the y -axis)and apply a checker texture on your model then open the uv texture editor and scale the uv's so that they are square.

i remember that you first apply a checker texture to see if the uvs are "aligned" right. but i don't understand, how this can effect the bumpmapping.?

what i need is like the bump file projected only on a small part of the surface, and then repeated over the whole thing, so the "resolution" is sort of higher iykwim.the sand should look grainy.

If you use a 2d texture to create a bump uv's do matter only if you use a granite or something like that uv's don't matter ....
So just lay out the uv's open your webbrowser and google for large sand images which are tile-able(sand is usually tileable), and apply them to yor model then open the sand texture in photoshop and go to image adjust saturate, this will make a greyscale image of the sand save this one as sandbump or something like that.
In maya go to the hypershade create a lambert open the attribute editor and apply the sandtexture then goto bump and slap on the bumptexture, now delete the placement node of the bump and connect de 2d placement node of the color to the bump.
Then open the attr editor of the 2d placement node and turn up the value of the repeat uv node, (maybe turn on stagger)
until your happy.
now go to the filenodes(bump and color) and go to effects and set the filter value to about 0.100

a planar projection from the y axis will look good on the top but will cause warping on the sides. the reason why i even suggested automatic projection is because then you'll have projections of different sides of the model that you can then piece together.

as far as sand goes, grain isnt really appearent unless you get fairly close to it, what tends to be appearent though are ridges made by the wind, tracks, rocks sticking through it etc. so watch out with the bump or it'll look like a miniature set. photo refs can be misleading because alot of photos tend to have some grain anyway.

far shot


close shot

ok. first: i had the totally wrong texture.
then: "repeat uv " was the key.
but although i did as you wrote mastone i still don't get the bumpmapping right. the filter value i can only adjust for the color node. in my case the bumpmap even seems to rather smoothen the surface(see below; upper part WITH, lower part WITHOUT bumpmapping)and darken it.

I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish, but i think it's best if you handpainted that texture in photoshop.
And you can adjust the filter, but only in the file nodes not in the bumpnodes
Good luck:beer:

guess i'll leave it at the default mapping settings with no bumpmap. looks alright to me, grainy close,"ungrainy from the distance.
thanx for your help GecT & mastone;)