Blender School: Terrain 5 Materials

 I need to up my game. Seriously, I have been doing rookie-level terrain materials since I started using True Terrain 5. I'd just apply a few materials separated by simple masks. If I used filters, it was just a cheap hack to adjust the material's uniform appearance, such as darkening it.

When True Terrain 5 offered some pre-made materials, it was a revelation. I suddenly realised what all those weird colour adjustment nodes were used for.

Oh wow, Big Sanctus update

You can't use Sanctus material on True Terrain 5 unless you ditch its brilliant material system. I was adding a material to the focus object in my test scene when I remembered there had been a Sanctus update.

Sanctus Library is the work of Blender artist Sanctus, who has become a legend in procedural materials. His library now contains 1000+ assets. Really, it's unlimited because it's so darn procedural, with so many parameters to drive. More on this update, later, when I've run through all the changes.

Some of the masks

Slope Mask set to very tight for contrasty cliffs, etc

Valley Mask for a gradient on slopes rather than a tight band.

This procedural mask is a severe limitation, in that at high contrast settings it produces banding, sometimes creating a moiré effect.

Actual Mask files are memory-expensive, but offer much more power.

Patch Mask, cheap and flexible, is a first step in adding noise patches.

Material Progress

 I am slowly developing some better "big terrain" materials for use on the Halo: Raptor project. It's really slow going.

Tomorrow, I may do a Blender School post exploring how True Terrain 5's premade terrain materials develop their natural patterns—mostly using noise filters.

A True Terrain 5 premade material on a Martian-adjacent terrain 

I bought a bundle of add-ons!

I liked the look of some if its items, especially the camera rig. They are old works, but the blurb says that they all work with Blender 5.1.

Expect to see some experiments documented right here when I find time to install, read the docs and experiment with them. CableCam will be the first, although WeatherFX also looks really useful. 

Still so meh!

Winge time

My head cold is now tracking at about 15%. It's not bad, but it's not gone. I have nasty lower-back pain, not enough to leave me immobile, but I fear that one false move might make me so. I feel like a bone from last night's fish is lodged in my throat. Clara suggests that I might be feeling just a scratch from it. I hope so! All in all, a bit shit, really.

Work will distract you!

Very possibly. I am still tweaking the material node tree that I created. After the cleaning shift, I realised that while the tree is great, my materials were subpar, and some of the tree isn't doing much. I might rebuild it this morning.

Realistic Touch

This addon (See its store page) has been gathering dust for a few years. It looked like a series of grunge maps, including both big-scale dirt and smaller fingerprint, dust and scratch mask images. In fact, it's a lot better than that because the masks are all built into very powerful nodes that offer every kind of image manipulation function: scaling, rotation, Min/Max/Contract, with selectable colour gradient and/or colour inputs.

Three realistic touch masks mixed together

Infinite grunge!

Honestly, the interactivity is broken. I make changes and either nothing seems to happen or what happens isn't very useful. I will rebuild! I'll make a generic three-texture tree with grudge, spec, ambient occlusion and whatever else.

Step one

The basics!

Just one mask to begin with - not even a material texture, yet. Grime and AO are applied and working, mostly because the UV map has been "improved".

It's a lot simpler; one of everything, but it all works.

Just needs a couple of scuffed decals.

Mix in a texture map. AO and grunge are mixed into a single texture map. The texture output is used to generate a bump map, while the dirt and AO feed the specularity—not realistic, but effective. I'll experiment a bit more with how I implement these supporting material channels.

Gunship: Renewed enthusiasm.

 After the consolidation steps left the gunship full of holes and misdirected/corrupted normals, I thought I might need a break and worried that this might be one of those breaks that becomes permanent. Happily, on Sunday morning, I decided that the break I needed was to take a look at the materials. As the gunship is aimed at commercial release, and I've not had good experiences with Sanctus baked textures, I committed to creating some proper hull materials.

I found this tutorial on YouTube:
How to Texture Spaceships like ILM (in Blender Cycles (A real eye-opener!)

The basic approach of the material is as follows:

1. Base texture map for hull plates.
2. Use a Colour Ramp to set a base colour and soften the texture.
3. Add some light scratches with a grunge map, use a Mix RGB to blend with the base texture.
4. Stick a Map Range after the base texture, reduce the MAX so that the wear is not uniform.
5. Add a grunge texture and run it through an Ambient Occlusion node using the Distance input to add dirt into the object's inset details, such as between hull plates.
6. Use a Map Range on the input grunge map so it isn't too uniform.
7. In this case, I replicated the resulting hull material and added a colour tint. Then, I used a mask to pop out some areas for leak stains and replaced hull panels.

Rince and repeat!

Result

    

Next up:

• Back to modelling to fix more stuff, maybe some replacement pipes on the top of the hull.
• More small details on those edge rims.
  
• More details underneath (not a huge priority)
• More materials, such as the engine vents and displacement on the vector fins.
• More lamps.
• Fix the lights in the cockpit.
• New scans of Noah and Leo for the crew.