making sand?
 

Hey I need help making sand for a scene. A desert scene. I have no idea where to start. A tutorial would be great if someone knows of one or feels like stepping me through it. I found this tutorial http://www.studioharmony.sk/sand/sand.html but it's not for maya and I can't really follow it to make it work in maya

any help? maybe dirt? Anyone know how to make that? I'm sure I could turn dirt into sand.

How much sand do you have to work with? :P

If you only got a little you could easily just take a photo or make on in photoshop, otherwise I have no idea how to make it in Maya. :S

well my idea for the scene is a camel walking through the desert. I'm still in the middle of modeling the camel but would like to also get an idea of how to do the sand. I'd like it to be able to blow around with the wind. I'm guessing it's a dynamics thing, and since I don't know anything about that I'll have to do a lot of research.

Just use a poly plane, with a photo texture applied, touch of a bump map, should be good to go.

for the Dynamics, either use some particles of a fluid, I would go for the fluid.

thanks gster I'll start learning the fluid effects now. Like I said before I've never done anything involving dynamics so I had no clue what to do at all.

edit: When you say photo texture do you mean, lay out the uv's import into photoshop apply texture and so on? Or do you just mean use it like an image plane? Would there be a difference between the two in the final product?

wow I'm stumped, spent all day review tutorials on the basics of particles and fields, and fluids, and I can't figure it out at all...

For sand, what you want to do is what the board has stated. Get a picture of sand and just apply the picture via Hypergraph.

making the sand just a texture on a piece of geometry isn't going to do what I want it to do, I want to turn this desert into a wind storm and have sand blowing all over the place... or at least some sand blowing in the wind.

that will take some Fluids. Unfortunatly :(

Although they are very confusing, and lord knows I don't know everything about them either, you might have to just soldier through all the tutorials you can find, and then it will be easy for you.
Good luck!
Chris

so then it's definitely fluids and not particles? Alright time to dive and learn... I should just sign up for a school already.

You could use either or, theres no set rules, just what you feel more comfortable with, check out the fire ring tutorial, that might give you some ideas.

As for using a plane and a photo, that would do the job for the "static" sand, if you know what I mean, also if you want to start making footprints then your going to be looking into softbodies (theres a free tutorial at digital tutors in this)

I'll get right on the fire ring tutorial to learn that. Thanks again for all your help, I don't know if I'm going to get as detailed as footprints, maybe I will though.