This is a screenshot of the material room for the Poser sand texture I've been using for a couple of recent renders, plus a couple of test images.
I've realized that the tiling artefacts appear along the mesh lines of the Poser GROUND prop when I use AO. Simply turning off AO removes them, but without AO the sand doesn't look as good.
The U_Scale and V_Scale for the 'Image_Map_2' node (i.e. the noise image that's plugged into the Bump channel) control how 'grainy' the sand looks, and need to be adjusted to suit your particular render.
You should be able to use any tiling noise image (or a 3D Noise node) and any sandy texture image.
The 'Wave2d' node seems a nice way to get the foreground to blend into the background (I used my worldball with the sand environment set for lighting and background here)
Still doing tests with this material - once they're done I'll upload the MT5 and JPG images here.
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2nd image: I realised that using a simple square (i.e. four vertices, one face) instead of the Ground prop does away with the AO artefacts. That's great, provided you want a flat ground.
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3rd-5th images: Changed the hair material, but mainly checking the lady's outfit - I need to sort out which gear should be underneath, and maybe fix the pokethrough using adjustment morphs and/or multiple partial renders and GIMP.
6th image: I think this is what's meant by shadows 'migrating' if you set AO bias too high? Or maybe not.
7th image: Bump disconnected (this one's starting to show the 'poinsettia' effect from quality/crisp texture filtering http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2882945 )
8th image:Displacement disconnected
And yes, the model was the original 'Contender' http://www.sharecg.com/v/76989/gallery/1/3D-and-2D-Art/Contender « Less
