Photoreal ground surfaces

[omeone]

Hi all,

Can anyone share some tips and tricks for getting real good photoreal roads and footpaths for arch vis montages. I'm getting some OK results from combinations of image maps, procedurals etc. But it's always the part of the composite that stands out most as obviously CG. I usually go to the trouble of making lightprobes at every site where I make composite, and everything else in the scene renders out pretty nice, but the road surfaces consistently ruin the whole effect.

thanks, omeone

[jeremyhardin]

I had the same problem. My mistake was making the road look wet/new. My lighting and overall composite looked fine, but my parking lot was dark and pretty, and the real road was sun-bleached and had oil and tire marks.

[fxnut]

My tip would be to get outside with your camera and take loads of pictures of edges of pavements, roads, walls, etc. and borders and interfaces of different types of surfaces. They're always the most interesting bits, and are the most important thing to get right in order to avoid stuff looking CG. There's nearly always some sort of transition between different surfaces - the more gradual the transition, the older and more weathered it'll look.

[ponder_it]

I've had the same problem also. My way around it thus far way aging the textures in photoshop with dosch design's texture aging kit. Worked well. As well as I found that bump alone was not enough to fix the bump in tje road. So I used a fractional displacement of like 3% at about 5m(on all axis) on the road after I sub-divided it. Made it look much better, more realistic. Also found that adding little rocks closer to the edges of the road worked well. Used the tutorial for the dessert in the links as a bassis for the rocks (meaning import displaced mesh back into modeler, killed the polys, killed the points in the middle of the road leaving on the points off to the side of the road left with the odd srtaggler, and cloned rocks to the points).

Cheerz

[Integrity]

I don't know if it will add anything, but some roads have specific specular properties. I don't know how to explain it, but certain parts of the road will have higher specular settings then the rest. As if let's say, the very top of the bump, would be a high specular, and the inside of the cracks, would be low, because of dirt. I have tried this method and it does add to the realism, but only if moving the camera or at viewing at a certain angle(obviously because of where the light is positioned). Try messing around with a gradient on the bump height. Hope this helps.

integrity05@aol.com

[omeone]

thanks guys,
I guess it will be a fairly manual process then, painting in extra details, either in PShop or with weightmaps in LW ( a la fxnut's great tutorial I found last week :)

I made a test over the weekend, and put some double yellow lines on the road edges, and it improved the overall look a lot... so fxnut's right on the button there - unfortunately for me though, the architects in this project have elimated all line painting from the design.

I'd love to go with oil stains, stones, chewing gum, leaves and litter (cos I think that would probably do enough) but I'd never be let - so it seems I'll really have to go for the subtle effects and put a lot of manual work into the diffuse and specular channels. I think I'll put a few more people in the foreground to hide more of the surfaces too... (yeah, cop out, heehee).

thanks again, hopefully post something in the WIPs board for destructive criticism later this week...

[fig]

you might check out the pavement tutorial in the lab section at dvGarage (http://www.dvgarage.com/), goes into detail with how he layered different images to get a very real looking parking lot texture. think you might need to create an account to access it, but there's some great content there.

chris