little help with ground texture(dirt)

[Billabong]

I have to do a closeup up the baseball field I have been working on and I have been trying to get the dirt part to actually look right, with no luck. I have been using Niel Blevins tutorial on using mix maps to combine 3 dirt maps, but its just not looking right. Ive attached images of what my dirt texture looks like rendered and the bitmaps Im using and what I need to achieve.

I would really appreciate any tips or suggestions.


Thanks for any help

-B

[TheMulf]

Well one quick observation is that your missing clumpy shadows. I would make a displacement texture that looks "raked."

[duke2]

The noise to mix the bitmaps is too obvious. Also, run them through CrazyBump and get some normal maps from them. If you have VRayScatter, throw some randomly sized, very low poly pebbles over the surface with a camera clipping distance. It will add the occasional big lump and it's expected shadow, without killing your rendertime like using displacement would.

[TERRA Operative]

Your mix map is too small and defined too. You want it much larger and blended more.

[BBB3]

That's right, you want to work more on your noise. Mix different fractals at different scale to get a really varied coverage.

Also, it looks like you're filtering your textures. At such an angle, this will kill all the details.

I would also use three different UV projections in the mix and three different-scaled textures showing the ground from different heights to add variety. You can rotate some of the textures to make the tiling less visible.

In the mix, I would include one UV projection encompassing the entire field (no tiling), paint a black and white dirt map, and use it in the mix with multiply as blend mode at anything between 30 and 50 per cent. That way you can add darked and lighter patches that don't tile over the entire surface. Doesn't even have to be hugely hi-res. I do that for large expanses of grass and it works well.

Finally, I would use 2d displacement at least on the foreground (split your mesh). It won't look realistic without some geometry in it.

[TERRA Operative]

Another idea is to check that the blur setting on your bitmaps isn't the default 1.0. I set it to 0.1 or even 0.01 if I want all the details in the bitmaps to be preserved and not blurred over.