modeling rock candy? (max or maya)

breakneck

i'm having some difficulties perfecting a weapon i'm modeling for a troll. its a rock candy mace.
heres some refs and concept:




been messing around with compound/scatter object in max and this is the best i've come up with:




i'm not too pleased with it, and i'm not familiar with modifiers too much--anyone got any suggestions to better create this effect?
-also i'm keeping it lower poly - under 250-200 tris would be nice
-thanks!

Sage

well think of them as crystals like the ones in starcraft that interlock together instead of clumps of squares. If you need it to be that low model a volume that is like a bat and make the texture do most of the work. Try making a high poly version ofr lack of a better term and give it a shader. Make it look like glass to do this you might get away with just using to version of the shader, one slightly more transparent than the other.

So make a cube. Make a copy of that cube, give them a noise map for the bump. Make the copy of the cube slightly smaller. You can add a few spheres inside with the same glass material to face bubble shapes. Clone that so it makes a cylinder shape. Then clone that shape so it looks like a tube. Then taper the tube shape with a modifier, like say taper or a lattice. Worst case you have to do it by hand. Your high poly should look like a club

Now make a low poly for the shape of the volume as best you can, then bake that to the low poly weapon. If you can't do that then render a view as a base of a texture that you can clone in photoshop. There you have something that looks like a crystal club. Maybe.

Alex

Hope that gives you ideas.

Alex

Bal

In zbrush I did something that looked a bit similar once to try and make rocks, by just using the fastmallet brush, and quickly alt-clicking in different areas, gives this kind of result:
http://born-robotic.net/stuff/zbmallet.jpg
Could probably do something better by configuring the brush a bit, I just left the default settings there. Hope that helps.