LogInPavel Oliva shared a brief breakdown of his Ammonites on Archaeological Site material created with Material Maker for #Mayterials 2025.
Pavel Oliva is a renowned 3D artist whose procedural tools you've probably seen a lot on 80 Level. Today, he will show us his material-making workflow using his fossils on an archaeological site entry for this year's #Mayterials challenge.
Ammonites on Archaeological Site
This material is part of the Mayterials challenge organized annually by The Club. It was created using the Material Maker 1.4 beta and rendered in Blender. I had a small personal objective for this year’s challenge: to explore the new features introduced in version 1.4, which had just entered beta a few days before the challenge began.
The material was made for the 9th topic, “Brushed.” My initial idea was to create something resembling an archaeological site with dinosaur bones and skeletons. However, my philosophy during these challenges is to create more generic materials that others can use in their own projects or as a learning resource, since I share all of them for free. That’s why I decided against the skeleton idea as the shapes would have been too distinct and repetitive for a tiling texture. Instead, I narrowed the scope and focused on something smaller, like ammonites.
As for my workflow, it's quite similar to that of those who use Substance 3D Designer. After gathering references, I start by working on the height map.
This particular material was divided into three main sections blended together: rock, sand, and ammonite shells. While developing the height map, I usually extract several masks from it to create a basic albedo and roughness map. This helps me better visualize the shapes and how they're distributed across the material. Thanks to the procedural nature of the workflow, I can easily tweak or change elements anytime, which makes experimenting and creating variants easy, and so it's often a back-and-forth process.
For sand or similar grain-like materials, I sometimes (depending on the desired art style) simply overlay color noise on top of the normal map. This enhances the appearance of softness and granularity and helps to create tiny speckles that catch the light. This effect isn’t achievable by using a highly noisy heightmap alone due to how normal maps are calculated based on the surface slope.