3D Gravel Recommendations

Can anyone recommend a realistic 3D gravel for a driveway. Having 3D grass, weeds, shrubs and trees which look very realistic, using a 2D gravel for a driveway doesn’t quite fit in. This would be for Sketchup/Vray.

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Have you looked at the already available Vray materials? You might also look at sites like https://www.arroway-textures.ch/ which would have textures with the required maps.

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Hi Royal-1135, as DaveR mentioned, Arroway has very good materials.
Other sources you can look into are Quixcel Megascans, or since you already have a Vray licence, Chaos Cosmos.

Example of Megascans:

Now if you are looking for 3D gravel models, I recommend that you use the ones that are included in the Chaos Cosmos + Vray Scatter (or the Skatter plugin).

Example of models from the Cosmos scattered with Vray Scatter:

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Hi Dave

Thanks for recommending Arroway. I was not aware of this website.

Thanks Acordabo10 for the response.
Are you using the Vray Cosmos rock and reducing its size to create the gravel. If so will this take a lot of memory when you use the rocks with Vray Scatter.

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Well actually that will depend on the number of polygons you have to generate. How big is the surface you want to fill with gravel rocks?

Also Vray does an excellent job of handling its proxies anyway.

I tried it the area is too big

Are you using the Lindale version of Skatter or the Vray Scatter

The larger the area, it seems to me the smaller the individual stones would become (in an overall view), and therefore their 3D nature would be more and more obscured. Have you tried a simple flat texture, or a bump-map?

sample of gravel driveway revised

Thanks for the response. I have used 2D in the past but when you look at some of the 3D gravel that is being used in renderings, it looks so much better than what 2D has to offer.

Do you have Skatter? If so it comes with 3D Bazaar, the 3d asset marketplace…and within there you can find the free gravel model and Skatter setup that you can use. Skatter the extension, like V-Ray Scatter, allows you to NOT load the proxies into the model…so that it only shows at render time - reducing memory load and keeping performance of SU fast.

See example:


Thanks for the response Eric. I tried out the Skatter gravel last night for a driveway. I would sometimes get the Bug Splat warning if I did the whole driveway.

You would think that’s the sensible approach. All depends on how good a texture you can get. I can see why @DaveR likes the site he suggested because of the wood textures, but they do have a gravel pack for 79 euros. I’m all ears here too, because I’m in the middle of learning this scatter stuff.

They do have some nice wood textures although I don’t use them. They look like plastic laminate to me. I make my own wood textures from full length photos of real boards.

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Ah bummer about the crash. Yeah I imagine it could be a lot to process depending on the size. Not sure if this applies or not but Skatter can render only what shows up in your ‘field of view’. You can manually ‘limit’ what renders as well by using Advanced Camera Tools to show the camera volume as geometry - which can be used to ‘clip’ the rest of the area out form being rendered.



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Are you using displacement or height maps in your “2d” gravel materials? It makes all the difference in the world.

I recommend using erode plugin in the surface first, and then apply the material with displacement.

It will look nice, as if it was 3d, and it will be much easier to setup.

Having large surfaces scattered with small rocks will require an insane amount of geometry, even when using proxies.

What you can do is mix both scatter with low density and a material for the road. That scatter will add an extra realistic touch to the rendered area, will allow you to show pebbles outside the road too and it’s not hard to setup.

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Have you looked at Poliigon.com

If you search for gravel they have 52 to choose from, and they work well with VRay.

Thanks Eric for that tip. Very helpful.

Thanks Joao Lots to learn What handy plugin to have Thanks for passing that on I will give it a try

Hi Kevin

Thanks for the reply.

I have been using Poliigons gravel texture for a while now. I still think the 3D gravel looks much better, just have to solve in some cases the computer drain problem.

Quixel