Material Wealth

 I took a break from worrying about the lack of progress on the Halo terrain to practice with the material setup I learned from Nico Linde's video.

I tried this approach right after the tutorial, but I didn't explore its full capabilities. Today, I did. Wow!

3 textures blended with curves. Add grunge and a bit of ambient occlusion. Result!

This is so good because the setup gives you a lot of power to tweak and change using any three suitable texture file sources. Also, cooking things like specularity, roughness, and normal maps using nodes is cheaper in memory, although you could get results quite as good as a fully developed PBR material.

Quick terrain to order

Someone on the TrueVFX discord asked for advice on creating a terrain. I gave them my three pence worth. 

True Terrain's built-in tools

World Creator effort

I wasn't happy with World Creator's lifts. I need to figure out how to create cracked bedrock-style cliffs with lots of fragmented blocks.

Modular Construction

The material development was for these handy building blocks

Coming together nicely.

Later, I'll create decorative elements such as pipes and air-conditioning units.

Blender School - blending object materials

 

Blending into the ground

There are techniques for placing terrain assets to blend with the ground material and remove obvious seams. The same technique can be used in other situations, but this scenario was raised by Drew, the director. Given that I try these things, then forget what I did some weeks or months later, I thought I'd make this a Blender School post.

Technique 1: Geo-Nodes (From James Combridge)

 Concept: Create a mask to apply to an object's material that checks the distance from the ground object.

Object info node that looks at the Relative position of the GroundPlane Object via the Geometry Proximity Node (distance). The result is pushed through the Stored Named Attribute node and is given the name GroundMask. Simples!

The Rock (object) material gets the Ground material added via a Mix Shader node using the "GroundMask" attribute we just set up.

For more control over the blend placement, make the following edit to the GroundMask:

Take the Geometry Proximity output and feed it through a Map Range, using its adjustments to fine-tine where the blend happens. You can further improve the look by adding another Map Range, mixing them (Mix node) using a Noise Texture as the factor.

Technique 2: Normal Mapping (From SpennyFX)

SpennyFX looked at an alternative to the above technique using normals.

First tip: These materials shouldn't be wildly different or the results are not likely to be convincing, at least close up.

This technique produces a more ambient-occlusion-like mask suitable for smaller objects.

The factor for the Mix node is the object's normal separated on the Z-axis and pushed through a colour ramp (default) that is adjusted to mix in the ground to the bottom of your target objects.

There's a third technique available that I won't go into here. It handles the blend as a compositor step. See more about it on the CG Matters channel.

Testing Blender 5.1

In spite of a number of quirky errors, Blender 5.1 looks functional. The only major addon that remains incompatible (as far as I've tested) is Geoscatter.

Small teams don't always have the bandwidth to update addons prior to a new Blender release. That's fine. I would maybe not sling mud, though. Blender has updated its underlying Python version. It seems a bit unfair to characterise this as "breaking" most addons. It's a major, breaking product change, but it's well understood and planned. It falls on addon developers to track and keep their products up-to-date.

I guess that Geoscatter will be updated in due course, and it's possible that Blender 5.1 might need a hotfix if any serious issues fall out of general use.