Generated Desert Sand

 Idea for generating windblown sand texture in Blender, and Unreal Engine.

I saw some nice sand patterns from a desert photo and it reminded me of the weird type of patterns the Blender Musgrave texture generates. After some experimentation, the results were actually pretty decent. Here are some examples of the setup.

The Musgrave textures are stretched out run, through ramps and blended together, then a Voronoi is used to make variations in the strength of some of the peaks. The Musgraves are also rotated around at different angles, because they tend to reveal repeating lines with larger scale values.

This technique might also help generate some interesting textures to use for panning water normals.

using several blended Musgrave textures input
into a bump, and into normals for baking.
Output Normal map, and Heightmap.
Tweaked to make seamless in Krita.

Shader setup on a plane in UE4

Simple UE4 shader with added color,
and heightmap to modulate roughness.
Blended the normal map with a seamless noise normal
to add some fine grains.

Download Texture Images