Sandier ( how do I get sand everywhere? )

I’m playing around with this.


Is there a good way to make it look like a sandstorm just passed? The little sand hills kind of work. ( they do need work too ) But what I’m really looking for is some way to make the sand not look infinitely fine ( the edges are very sharp where I expect little hills of sand and especially sand that has been blown past an object to be sandy )
Is this the point where I need to get acquainted with particles and physics?

Thanks for reading, have a good one!

you could probably use textures rather than particles. check out cg cookie’s canyon tutorial, it deals with sandstone textures so it may be useful to you.

what did you do to create the sandy hills there?

Thank you Small, I’ll certainly do!
Samuraishi, I took the original objects ( The battery and the other device ), made a copy of them and then removed the part of the mesh that wasn’t “Windward”. After that I eyeballed how I thought sand would accumulate on that side and added the mesh.
Near the edge of the object I made the sand that sticks out beside the objects “overshoot” with a point in the wind-shadow of the objects.

The material is a yellowish thingie with 3 colours noise over it and a cloud in the bump-channel. Nothing too fancy.
( Sorry for the colours, I’m quite colourblind )

Ah I was thinking of a method where you create a plane and move it just below your cracked soil then using dynamic topo sculpt create more sand, the problem however is the areas where the two surfaces meet,

You might be able to create a texture for the area around those seams that is a mix of transparency and sand colour and extremely noisy.

Particles and physics might be the way to spice up textures and erase sharp transitions. Cycles are keen to render repetitive geometry and while this is just a couple of particle systems on plane you could generate them (as simple cubes) and let them free fall on your slopes.


I was just experimenting with a way to break up the edges of the sloping sand and the ground plane by dyn sculpting the ground plane around where the sloping sand is then in edit mode scaling it back to 0 in the z axis to give verts in that region to weight paint for some hair particles that are a dupli object of a simple small cube,