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I don't know if the answer is in the modeling, texturing or even the compositing part but my aim is to be able to achieve a nice visual look between two meshes (like in the render shown below).

The picture is a snowman scene and one of the worse parts of the render is the joint between the ground and the snowman.

When looking at it, it is pretty obvious that both snowman and ground are two separate objects and that is because when I tried modeling the ground as an extension of the snowman, the textures wouldn't apply properly and the overall look was even worse than the current result.

This is only one example out of many other situations in witch I get this kind of issues.

I'm interested in knowing what solutions could be found to that problem.

Snowman scene

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  • $\begingroup$ A first glance tells me that the crystal's light doesn't project shadows... You may have to turn on Ray shadow button in the light properties, and see if it look better. $\endgroup$ – Polosson Jun 17 '13 at 9:54
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    $\begingroup$ IMO, modeling them as one mesh would be the best way to go.. or at least the snowman's body. You just need some seams in the right place. $\endgroup$ – iKlsR♦ Jun 17 '13 at 11:47
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    $\begingroup$ Beautiful crystals! $\endgroup$ – wchargin Aug 12 '13 at 2:14
  • $\begingroup$ i have the same problem posted in blender.stackexchange.com/questions/4922/…. A blending of two textures is not sufficient for me. For me it would be more interesting to integrate the bump of the ground to upper object. Additional i want to add some partialy dirt on the stones, like washed out through rain. Similar effects could be intresting for snowman, e.g. some snow on stones, but using the bump map of stones as well. But how can we realize this in blender? $\endgroup$ – grenzfrequence Nov 18 '13 at 12:39
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In 3D modeling this is often quite difficult.

  • You could make them the same mesh and join the geometry, then use a vertex-group or vertex-colors to blend between 2 materials (most obvious solution, check on tutorials for blending between materials).

  • You could cheat...

    • add grass (particle systems), pebbles, rocks etc - this is what happens in real life isn't it?, it will likely increase render times but hide the join.
    • you could apply alpha to the lower part of the mesh that meeds the ground so you don't see a sharp change.
    • You could add a strip of faces which sits just above the join and blends between the 2 surfaces (with alpha on both sides so you don't see any hard edges), I don't recommend this but it can be made to work, you just have to be careful that lighting is ok and its not casting shadows on the faces below it.
    • You could render them on different layers and composite them, alpha blending parts of the lower mesh. (I don't recommend this but adding for completeness)
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  • $\begingroup$ Wow Thanks a lot, these are all great ideas witch I haven't tough of (except for the adding grass, rock, etc... but my computer wasn't powerful enough) ^^' anyways thanks once more. $\endgroup$ – Shinsaku Jun 17 '13 at 15:47
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Procedural texture should handle strange surfaces like that very well. Image based textures need proper UV unwrapping.

  1. use these two modifiers: Boolean (Union) + Remesh

  2. The old way of doing it would have been to model them together by hand,

  3. Having softer light around those areas makes them a lot less visible. That is to say you need light bounding around, Cycles does that by default.

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