Rock Arch Sculpt C&C

Utility

Howdy peeps,

I'm very inexperienced with zBrush, so I decided to bust it out and sculpt something. I chose a rock archway, since it has many interesting hard and soft surfaces- anyways, I feel like I learned a lot but it's lacking something. Maybe a lot of somethings! Please feel free to give scathing comments and critiques, and hopefully I (and others) will learn something new. I plan on working this into a side project eventually, so I'd like to get an idea on how to crank out delicious looking sculpts.

BTW, the polycount on the base mesh is about 1,500 tri's.
Thanks!





Loosely based off this photo, and a few other references:

Snader

Even with the photoreference, it seems too flimsy to be possible.

Zipfinator

Snader wrote: »

Even with the photoreference, it seems too flimsy to be possible.

Yeah. It just looks awkward. If it looks wrong in the real world, it's going to look wrong in a game.

tristamus

I definitely understand your want to model / sculpt / texture something exactly as it is in real-life, however, as others have mentioned here, it just doesn't look.....right?

This is Game Art! TAKE your LIBERTIES and create something SIMILAR, instead of going for the end all be all hyper-realism, with this piece at least.

No one will yell at you for making something representational of this Rock Arch that is a bit more varied than the photo reference, and in fact, will look more appealing with the unique qualities that you'll give it as an artist during the process!

I'd also like to mention, that this plays into normal maps! (I know, bit of a tangent *Pun Intended*).

With normal maps, even though we are trying to create a representation of something that may have super hard / sharp edges, we often don't, because if we did, the normal maps wouldn't read very well! We bend the realism a tiny bit, and give things more bevel / chamfer to add to the overall quality of a shape and / or normal map.

Utility

Thanks for the responses guys. I'm a little confused though-

1) you're all saying that it doesn't look right because the rock is too thin, and that it wouldn't work. I get that it may look fragile, but isn't that usually what these kind of rock arches appear like? They're eroded away by wind over time and probably are somewhat fragile. Maybe I should have framed it better- this is supposed to be a large set piece you can travel underneath, but not on top of. Does this make more sense?

2) I'd like to sculpt 'realistically', but not necessarily photo-realistic. If you look at my sculpt, you'll see ridges and rock sections that aren't there in the reference. The reference is really quite smooth, but I wanted more of a rough appearance. In games, I understand that you usually have to exaggerate the shape/silhouette of an object in order for players to immediately understand what it is, so I tried to push the 'rock'ness of the sculpt.

What I'd really like to know is, besides it maybe not looking plausible, what about the shapes in the sculpt? Does it look like rock? Does it read as a rock arch, as fragile as it may be? I'm more concerned with the texture, silhouette and overall skill as opposed to whether or not it could be real. What do you guys think?

modern

We put this geological feature in Dirt 2. It became known as the "pissing tea pot", and yes it was beefed up to make it more believable:

The car drives under it at around 2:14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg-qGFxjZmw