SO I am trying to put together a scene set in the desert, and want to have some mountains in the background. I am having a heck of a time creating moutains that are at all good looking though. I was hoping to create/find a material that would give me a result kinda like this...

[attachmentid=22661]

Does anyone here have any suggestions that could help??

Have you looked at the darkTree textures

numerous free ones available. free plugin avaiable for AM<v12

plugin included in AM>v13


on texture alone probably wont get that effect, but in a combiner, maybe

that should be possible ...will try to post tomorrow

if you use the dark tree www.darksim.com textures along with gradients you can get that but be aware that there is a problem with bump maps on gradients that I have submitted a bug report on. if you get a chance you need to purchuse the mastering materials CD's from anzovin www.anzovin.com, they are great. hope this gets you in the right direction,

btw, that looks like a vue material if I am correct. main I wish we could get those in AM..

Took a short cut and used darktrees which I have included in the zip all free from the darktree site

http://www.darksim.com/Repository/
http://www.pixelburg.com/am_materialtest/d...nt21/index.html
http://www.darksim.com/html/simbiontam.html
http://www.deadeyez.com/

This is a v13 project file


[attachmentid=22716]


resulted in this with slight tweaking

[attachmentid=22717]

Hi Rampage ....

I created a set with desert and mountains to put my plymouth breeze.. I used decal in it...

There is a bug when you have a single material containing a bump pr dosplacement map inside a gradient.

You can work around this using a material's Bump or Displacement property along with turbulence.

Here is a quick example. It would not be hard to add some extra complexity to match Rampages0007's material.



I have attached the project file.

the only problem is that will not work with a darktree matieral.

You are right about Darktrees. Until the bug which affects gradients and materials that include bump and displacement effects is fixed, then the method I suggested is the only alternative.

I must admit I never realised how big the problem was until I started testing. It affects V11.1, 12, 13 and 14. All forms of combiners have the problem. I better get a report of my own in.

Richard Harrowell.

Brian Prince had made a really nice material for desert type strata, which I've used in the past. I don't know if they're on the AM Matrix site though. When I get home I'd be happy to send what I have though (but I don't know if they work in V13 or not).

For sand, I followed an Eggington trick. I had two bump layers. One was simply noise made in Photoshop for the sand texture, the other I took a brush in PS and created waves representing how sand looks when it's blown. Then I put those onto a plane that had various heights (for dunes), and used a light sand color. You could also bump decal as a ambiance decal to slightly approximate how light reflects off of sand.