advice on sculpting a cliff

WindchILL

Hi all, I'm new to zbrush so I'd like a few pointers before I tackle this project. I'm trying to create a modular cliff (game model so reduced faces after hi-res sculpt) with this specific look to it



I really want to capture the striated look of this shale cliff, but I'm not sure how to approach it. Should I just dive in with high-res sculpting onto a plane or cube (and if so, which brushes should i use?) or should I find some images to create a height map?

Brian "Panda" Choi

Probably better to just create a couple of sheets of low-res flat cubes, and just use trim dynamic and the Clay brushes to cut into them (each sheet being sculpted alone) along with whatever alphas you need, and then once you have a couple variations, stack them all in Maya into a rough square, and dynamesh them in ZBrush.

If I'm not mistaken, the height map tesselation happens in engine and not before import, so you'd be dependent on a height map, if you extracted from an image, you would have not as much control over compared to you sculpting your own mesh and just retopologizing and baking down the maps.

What kinda game is this ending up in? This might affect the scale of the slate rock pieces.

WindchILL

its gonna be in an RTS game called Maestros, built in UDK, perhaps youve heard of it.