How to create a procedural stone material (Author: www.cgdigest.com)

How to create a procedural stone material

This is a short tutorial that explains how to create a stone material in 3ds max without using any textures, only procedural maps. The tutorial has been written for vray, but the same concept can be applied to mental ray as well.

Create a chamfer box and apply a vray material to it. Click the bump slot of the material (in the maps rollout) and choose “Perlin Marble”.

In both slots of the perlin marble parameters choose smoke, and adjust the settings like in the following image:

Now apply a vraydisplacement modifier to the object, choose 3D mapping, set the amount to 5-6cm and drag the previously created perlin marble map on to the texmap slot.

It is important to set the displacement method to 3d mapping, since 2d mapping doesn’t work with procedural maps.

At this point we only need to add something in the diffuse channel. In this case I have added a smoke map with 2 different noise maps for both slots, like in the screen captures bellow:

That’s it.

Some conclusions:
The parameters of each map, don’t have to be exactly the ones that I have used in this tutorial. The important thing is to diversify them as much as possible, so there won’t be any visible repeated patterns in the rendering. That is the reason we have used mixed maps in the first place.
The main disadvantage of using this method is that you need 3d mapping for vray displacement, which implies longer rendering times.

In an effort to keep this tutorial as simple as it can be, I have touched only the diffuse and the bump channels of the material, but if you feel like experimenting more, don’t be afraid to play with other channels as well (especially reflection). You can obtain several materials like various types of stones, concrete, rough terrain, mud etc.
You can also combine 2d raster maps with procedural ones… sky’s the limit.
Here is the 3d max scene that I used for this tutorial (grass maps not included).

If you try this method and obtain some results that you like, I would be happy to see them; feel free to contact me at cgdigest (at) gmail (dot) com