This is failed experiment, even if I got some nice pictures in the process. I wanted to replicate the look of sand dunes, these that you can see on the typical desert pictures. After struggling my mind for a while to come up with a decent method by myself, I given up and started searching on the net.
I quickly found the IRTC entry GeDesert by Christoph Gerber. On the accompaining text, he explains how he done the dunes with a turbulent quilted pattern. I tried the trick and indeed it gives very nice results, but still not totally realistic. Anyhow, I think it’s the most close you can get with POV patterns, and it’s a very clever trick. Here is an example of the heightfield functions used:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | function{ pigment{ quilted color_map{[0 rgb 0][1 rgb 1]} scale 1 warp{ displace{ granite poly_wave sqrt(1) color_map{[0 rgb -1][0.5 rgb 0][1 rgb 1]} scale 20 } } scale .1 warp{turbulence .33} scale 10 translate 10000*rand(r_terra) scale .2 } } |
For the lighting I used Skylight (Lightsys), and the palms are of course from POVTree. The sand texture uses the aoi pattern from MegaPOV, to blend the basic sand texture with the sun color depending on the viewing angle.
WIPS
