The picture is a portion of "Oasis" from the "Pictures" folder on the Vue4 application CD, one of many from the pre-made scenes/pictures on the disk. Without loading the scene it came from (and cheat), how can I recreate these ripples in the sand? I've tried and tried using a variety of bump material functions, altering their settings, experimenting with xyz, but I'm no closer. I am assuming this scene WAS done entirely in Vue, so how did they do it? Are they gods or something?? *lol* Any ideas on where to start? I find material functions most puzzling. Do you have to have a PHD in math to learn them? JoeBlack

Maybe you should use the terrain editor, it might be exactly what you need to use for terrain accuracy. Sharen

Actually, this is a material made up of two materials. One normal sand, the other as sand with ripples. By mixing the two, and using either a function or by using altitude/hieght options you can get this effect. I think this used to be a material in Vue, at least on version 2 or 3. Greg

I would suggest loading the scene and taking a good hard look at how the materials were laid out. That's what those sample scenes are there for: to learn techinques from that the manual falls short of explaining in detail.

Thanx guys and gals ;) I meant how do you actually go about creating the ripple effect from scratch? What functions do you use? Which bump function in the Material Editor? How do the ripples start and stop so abruptly? JoeBlack

welll.... if you open the material and look, you'll see what functions they used and all. functions are kinda esoteric, you really have to play with them to figure them out. if i had to guess, i'd say maybe a sine function? although they also wiggle sideways too, which is more like a marble or agate function. perhaps some water ripples or troubled water?