Giving Depth to ground

[Dwight]

Nothing to it.

This would be in the realm of art rather than operation, but if you were to make your ground have a thin top layer and on that substance use a gravel texture with bump mapping and some transparent parts, achieved through an alpha channel with a 2 pixel feathering, the holes will actually round a little to look like pebbles. You'll have to knock out specified colors to define the see-thru® areas. Make the surface material beneath fairly dark and noisy for contrast.

An approach like this works for water surfaces, too.

[Dwight]

This is mainly a Photoshop exercise.

It is easy enough to copy your ground plane,reassign material and elevate it 100mm and make it that thin.

The key to this process is establishing an alpha channel mask in Photoshop. You'll elect the areas you want to be transparent by masking them and feathering the mask to round the edge. You can learn this process by studying Photoshop masking technques.

When using the new texture in a new perforated material, ask for bump map and transparency in the alpha channel dialog for that material.

Karl? Have you got time to explain this more deeply?

[Dwight]

and by feathering the edge of the mask, and asking for both alpha bump and transparency, the edge gets soft-rounded.


Ba doo, ba ding.