Any ideas on how to create this advanced mars surface??

Basically I am trying to recreate this:

See those super eroded slate cliff rocks on the left side and all that rubble and soil that comes from it at the sand.
I am new to WM but not new in computer graphics, I managed to get started with WM quickly, but any ideas or tips from the real pro would be awesome!
Best regards! Tom

WM cannot create overhangs, so you can’t reproduce the areas where the slate sticks out over the sand. That’s inherent to the heightmap format.

For the slate, the terrace node is the place to start. The slate looks like a cap layer over some other softer rock, so you might limit/mask the terrace effect to just the higher elevations. After getting something that looked reasonable, I think I’d throw in a “spidery” or “ridge-y” noise to break up the masses of slate.

For the sand, you have a couple of approaches to try. You could crank up erosion really high and use the sediment deposits as the sand. Or you could use a separate low frequency terrain node and blend/mask that in to the rockier terrain. Take the max of the sand and rock terrains, maybe. Might identify the slate areas first, then taper the sand amplitude down to zero as it approaches slate (via masking and feathering/making-gradual the edges of the masks).

I think I would apply the terrace node after the sand/rock blending, but that might that’s just an initial guess at what would work.

For the rubble, add in a very high frequency, low-and-clamped amplitude noise in selected regions. In that photo, those regions would be elevations just under the bottom of the slate threshold.

That’s all off the top of my head. Be very interested to see what you come up with!

Hi Sfriedberg!
Thnx so much for the tips! I have been busy with it and so far I have come up with this:

Here i used the erosion, noise and terrace nodes. But the rocks have too much erosion. They should feel more like broken rocks / cracked.

So, I didn’t get the ridge-Y effect working, althought I played with both perlin noise and advanced noise. (that ridgeY effect you talked about, is it suppose to follow the hills downwards anyways?) For now I used the flowmap and substracted it from the terrace. It gives a bit more cracked rocks but I there most be a better way.

Currently, I am focusing on that Slate rock part. For the sand, I indeed used the sediment in combination with snow.

My question now is:
is there a way to create real cracked lines that follows the hills? Much like a flowmap but then just thinner lines. See the red lines I draw in the most basic setup.

BTW this terrain is the same as the seen on the nasa picture. In my WM version I used an existing heightmap :slight_smile: