Modular Rock Feedback

cozzbp

Hey, just made some rock sculpts and baked down some textures today, wanted to get some feedback on them. I feel like they are missing something.....not sure what.


Any criticisms are welcome and very appreciated.

EDIT:
References:

enoki

It's very monochromatic. Adding some moss or just little bits of color should help.

cozzbp

Added some color variation to the texture:

Wingednosering

I'm not an expert by any means, but it seems to me they're just too generic. Modular pieces can still have detail.

Technically, I see a couple spots where the UVs are off and causing unfortunate stretching.

Artistically, you're lacking a unified theme between all the rocks (The Witcher 2 reference you're showing is missing it too). There's no pattern to the striation of the rocks. With larger rocks (especially cliffs), you can often see horizontal strips of colour (different eras produce different types of sediment). The same goes for your large creases. If you want these pieces to fit together, they need to have similar directionality (all horizontal or vertical, keep diagonals subtle).

I don't see any specularity coming off them. Is there a spec map yet? If there is, amp it up and get a little creative with the colouring on it. Most rocks have a ton of colours reflecting off of them.

I don't know if you've done AO or not, but I would definitely advise it, since rocks have such massive areas that see little to no light, regardless of how they're flipped. Depending on how you intend to use these, grounding your ambient occlusion might help them fit better into the scene.

Finally, the shadows are too intense. Look at how light the shadows on the ground plane are compared to the inner sections of your rock models. Depending on the direction of your light, the shadows on the ground should be some of the most intense.

Just my two cents. I wish you luck!

cozzbp

I really appreciate the feedback! Here is an updated shot of what I have so far:


It still seems like the AO maps aren't really "popping" if that makes sense. I baked out a few AO maps, and combined them in photoshop as overlays (I know my UV islands suck):





Anyways, I'm a bit stuck on where to go next. I am currently using Zbrush for highpoly, MeshLab to decimate it to a lowpoly, and then xnormal to bake out maps. Any feedback would be awesome. Thanks!

ivanzu

Bake the edge highlight map and see if it improves the look.

ZacD

there's too much contrast in the diffuse. The dark parts in the witcher reference is caused by the normal map and the lighting.

SimonT

Hm from the ground they look OK to me, but from above they remember me more like paper....maybe you should use real world references instead of other games.

Ex-Ray

Why are you using the Witcher as reference? You're interpreting what another artist has interpreted, and there will be subtleties lost in translation.

Some real ref here:
http://pinterest.com/donnacrazylady/boulders-rocks-cliffs-caves-natural-bridges/
http://pinterest.com/nadinemay/rocks-stones-boulders-gemstones-and-pebbles/

Mark Dygert

1) Too much lighting info in the diffuse. The diffuse should be a color pass and MAYBE include some generic Ambient Occlusion.
Having deep dark shadows and highlights on your diffuse means they won't match the lighting in the scene and with modular pieces (that get rotated and repositioned) it could be coming from a lot of different angles, intensities and colors.

2) That is a HUGE texture and a lot of wasted space with a lot of UV seams which adds a lot of extra verts that don't need to be there.

3) The polycount wiki (link in the upper right) has some good tutorials about environment art and resources on rocks. Ex-Ray brings up a REALLY good point, don't copy a copy, copy the original, strive to do better than what you see in other games. Check them out but look them over for flaws and ways they are different from the original.

Constantly look to out-do what has been done before because that's what those studios are doing right now, you're referencing things that are old while they are busy working on things that will drop your jaw 1-2-3 years from now. When they hire you, they are doing it to work on those future games that go above and beyond what they did in the past.

Some lose advice about creating rocks:

1. Start with a box, tennis ball unwrap it.
   1. This creates a UV layout that fits well into half a square with very little wasted space, another rock can use the other half.
2. Apply turbosmooth and sphereify to make a quad sphere.
3. (optional) Apply various noise modifiers and maybe even do some paint based push/pull to wrangle it into a decent shape.
4. Then take that into a sculpting app and go to work.
   1. Remember that normal maps applied to the high poly will also bake down, in addition to the differences in geometry.
5. Because you already unwrapped it, you can export your lowest sub-division and you've got a really good start on your low poly rock.
   1. If you really wrangled your rock into a differnent shape and the UV layout isn't working you need to reunwrap it.
      1. Apply a planar map and use point-to-point seams to plot out logical seams in easy to hide areas, then break the edges and relax the UV's. Peel can be good for this it relaxes as you break.
      2. Use as few seams as possible and try to keep your piece in easy to pack chunks.