Mini-Tutorial: Hero Dune

The Dunes primitive gives you a nice dune field to work with, but sometimes you need a Hero Dune to make your desert look perfect.

The core component for creating the Hero Dune is the Recurve node. It will take a shape and, as the name suggests, reshape its curve in the selected direction.

To make the dune as dramatic as possible, we will draw the dune. In a new Mask node, just draw a wiggly shape that gives us the suggested outline of a dune’s complete area (including the slopes).

Next, we clamp the output to make it shorter, otherwise our next steps will be too tall.

The clamped output is then blurred heavily to give us soft slopes.

Now that we have our slopes, we need the sharp peak that is iconic of sand dunes. To do this, we add Apex. We now have slopes and peaks.

For the final touch, we add a Recurve node with a high duration. This will lower the dune and bias it towards one side while amplifying the curve around the “wiggles”, making it look like realistic wind blown sand around those curves. Changing the direction of the Recurve node can give interesting results!

And voila, the Hero Dune is ready!

You can make multiple dunes like this, and merge them using the Max mode in Combine.