Tyre tread marks in sand

[Steve Bentley]

You could use the deformation tab in the material. It does mean you have to subdmesh the plane (the material has settings for that so you don’t have to deal with all those dense polys in the viewport – the submeshing only happens at render time).
Depending on your textures you may have to blur them slightly so that you get a nice rounded “bump”. Go easy on the settings – depending on your scene scale it only takes a few digits to get a good deformation.
Depending on lighting bumps can work, but usually deformations (if you can afford the render hit) look better.
You can also use the deformation effector in Mograph or the deformation deformer to “bake” the polys into a mesh and save that out as an object. You can also just bake the texture and the deformation into the object with texture baking and then the system reads that cache at each render and saves the deformation time. This approach works great if the shadows aren’t changing over time or for a still.

[Greg Paterson]

Thanks Steve.

I am aware of most of what you stated in your reply
I am using a Physical sky in the scene and bump maps dont quite get there
Displacement with subdivision gets there …. its not an animation (yet) so render times are not a big issue
I have never used the deformation effector in Mograph I am still in the dark past with R14

I suppose what I was hinting at is if there is a procedural approach rather than using images
Any thought on this?

Regards

Greg

[Steve Bentley]

Deformation is deformation so whether you are using mograph or a shader or the deformer version, it ends up doing the same thing (splits the mesh into a bazzillion polys and shifts them based on luminance).
The only better deformation solution is to use Octane where the deformer there is basically alien technology.
As for procedural, you might be able to generate a noise pattern via code that looks like tire treads and then that would be resolution independent (you could use Coffee in Expresso for that or python).
The other thing to try is a leaf shader. There are a few around. If you simplified the leaf pattern down to a diamond and scattered that it might do the trick.

And having thought of that, what about using a spline to define a basic element of a tire pattern (like a fat Z – one of the repeating elements that works its way around the tire), extrude that, then use mograph to scatter those shapes in linear arrays, then use all of that as a displacer?
This would probably be easier in R20 now that we have fields to work with as effectors.
This would give you infinite resolution for the displacer and would only be limited by the mesh of the plane. In the end, that’s your resolution choke point anyway so a procedural solution might be overkill – in the end its all about how many polys the plane has.