HOW CAN I CREATE A SAND MATERIAL USING BLENDER?

Sophie Riddle, London

I will demonstrate an easy and powerful way to create a sand material using Blender. This scene is characterised by many elements, the lighting, the models, the reflections, the smoke simulation and obviously the materials, one of these is the sand material.

There are a lot of methods for creating a sand material – for example, using image texture – but in this article, I would like to explain how to create a sand material in a procedural way using nodes in Blender.

Before we start with the creation of the material, we have to create the mesh: in this case, I created a simple terrain with some dunes. Once we have done this, we can start.

First of all, we have to open the Node Editor panel and add the Texture Coordinate input, the Wave Texture, the Colorramp (placed in the Converter section), the Hue Saturation Value (placed in the Color section), the Diffuse BSDF shader and obviously the Material Output.

These are the main elements of our material. Now we have to connect them and set the values.

We can start connecting the Texture Coordinate with the Wave Texture. If you have unwrapped the mesh, connect it with UV, if you haven’t done this, connect it with generated, normal, object, camera, window or reflection. In the Wave Texture we have to enter a value of 18.000 in Scale, 14.000 in Distortion, 14.000 in Detail and 0.400 in Detail Scale. To give more realism to the material, connect the Color with the Displacement (in the Material Output). Now we have to connect the Colorramp with the Hue Saturation Value and connect the last one with the Diffuse BSDF.

In the Colorramp we have to select the colours that we want for the sand material, in my case I used a mix of yellow and light pink. I fixed the colour using the Hue Saturation Value.

Next we can connect the BSDF of the Diffuse shader with Surface of the Material Output. And that’s all! A simple and quick way to create a sand material like this, perfect for stylised projects.

As well as looking good and getting you up and running, hopefully this shows how easy it is to work with nodes.

A revolutionary way to create a photorealistic material is with photogrammetry, which allows you to scan an environment to obtain accurate information for producing materials