Here's another one i did today, trying out something with more sharp corners. Rendered in UE4.. textures ended up being quite a mess (basically the same as the previous boulder), but here it is. I know, lots of space for improvement, but feedback always welcome.
@petemc nice one. Really like how you managed to bring out the cracks in the rock. Is that done with just the texture? Or was the texture from MS?
And speaking of textures, does anyone have some good tips on making them as hires, crisp, clean as possible? Since im still new in this 3d universe, im trying to find my way around things, and as i understood, i should strive for using as much uv space as possible and also go with a fairly high texture resolution like 4096x4096, but still with this resolution i see my textures pretty blurred out and pixelated. Are there other ways to tweak this to look better? Besides obviously adding detail texturing in the shader (i work with UE4).
@petemc Thanks. Glad you like it. Are those rocks you have there photogrammetry? They look really detailed.
@jonas_molgaard There's a couple ways to squeeze out more detail on your rocks.
One way is using detail textures to tile over your base mesh. Most modern game engines support it and I use it on all of my rocks in UE4.
The thing I'm becoming more of a fan of though, especially with really large rocks, is generating several tileable textures and then creating an RGB mask (I use Substance Painter) to control where those tiling textures appear. I also use a base texture/baked normal but since the tileables do most of the work you can be free to use lower resolution baked textures. If done well it'll be really crisp and pristine, however the material is quite a bit more complex than an ordinary material so you'll probably want to use it fairly sparingly.
Yes i use detail textures too, but don't get so good results as i want. About that other technique you mention, do you mean vertex paint masks so keeping one tiling texutre in each channel? Or is it something else? Any chance you can link to a guide on how to do that?
Unfortunately I don't really know of a guide or tutorial to link to. I'll probably do one in the future, but in the mean time I'll try and break it down as best as I can.
The first thing you should do is sculpt and texture your rock like you always do but just a base. It doesn't need to be perfect with amazing detail or anything, just a base as something to work off of.
At that point what I do is I make my tileable textures. What I do if I'm photosourcing is I make the textures/materials using bitmap 2 material 3 and then I go into photoshop with the albedo. Then I go to image<Adjustments<Match color and I match the color to my base. Usually I leave some room for color variation so I only do like a half match or so.
At that point what I do is I take everything into substance painter. I then apply the base material on the lowest layer and then the tileables subsequently on top. I also make sure to tile them at about what I want, however it doesn't really matter as they are there only for previewing.
At this point make all of the tileables invisible except one. Now apply a mask. What you can do at this point is add an effect and make a custom mask, or you can use one of the prebuilt masks (typically the prebuilt ones do well enough for me).
Once you're happy with how that mask is masked out, simply unhide the next tileable and do that one. For example you could have one type appear in the cavities, one that aligns to the z axis (such as a tileable snow texture), and one that appears on the edge highlights.
Now that you have the masks done you can now right click on each of your masks and export the mask. Then you will combine them into an rgb mask inside of photoshop.
Once you import the mask into unreal you can lerp between the different tileables using each channel of the rgb mask.
You can create multiple rgb masks to do as many layers as you want, however I would not recommend adding an alpha channel as that almost doubles the texture size. You'll get more bang for the buck by importing another texture.
One advantage here is the resolution of the mask usually isn't that big of a deal and can be pretty low resolution overall. On top of that you can ultimately ditch your base if you want and just have a baked normal and your tiling materials.
Hi Jack, and thanks a lot for that detailed explanation. I think i get the idea, but since i use Quixel Suite, i guess the equivalent is using the dynamasks (not sure you're familliar with QS?), but anyway just to make sure i understand the approach correct (i didn't merge the masks into one texture in this example). Note that i powered up the "Dust" mask in order to get the moss to stand out more clearly. It seems grey in the picture, but infact it's more black and white. I've also added object scaling to the tiling textures to make sure they look the same no matter the size of the object. Hope this is what you mean, because it is quite a nice approach i think. Only drawback i can think of, is that i have to carefull with my seams, since i won't be able to paint them out like i used to do. Is this somewhat what you had described? I have a series on youtube where i show my progress with various rock techniques, if it is ok with you, i'll add this to the existing series and remember to mention you.
Yep, you got it. Dynamasks are in fact the equivalent to what I was going by for substance painter.
One thing you can do to prevent the seams from cropping up is make sure only your base texture that has the seams painted out appear on the edges and cavities. If you've done your uv's well it should be seamless.
Feel free to add this to your YouTube series. Link your channel when you get a chance. I'd like to check it out.
With this approach i don't think i'll use a base texture at all, unless it's for something very modular that should be viewable from a lot of directions. I would definetely try to just use generic textures. Also i would most probably add a vertex paint node in to allow painting some of those extra layers in manually for more customization.
Here's a link to my the rock series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT4SeajOa6mbtW1QNQBvImp8nm7UtIlmY . Please note that i still consider myself a beginner and every day find myself learning new stuff which is a good indication that lots of the stuff i show, is either only partially correct or maybe already outdated hehe. I started doing these videos as a way to document my findings while sharing some of it with fellow noobs like myself. In anyway, i'll give a beep when i've made the next episode.
This thread is awesome. I have been fascinated by painting rocks for a long time and now getting in to sculpting them. Thank you @jonas_molgaard for the videos you made. I have watched 1/3 of the series and enjoyed it. I bumped into similar problems with my mesh as you mentioned in video part 1 with the holes and details.
I tried making a craggy large-scale cliff. On one side there's a lovely cliff edge, and on the other there's the pointy bits. Later this week I'll try making some tiling textures for the medium-scale details and and edgemask and stuff.
@petemc nice one. Really like how you managed to bring out the cracks in the rock. Is that done with just the texture? Or was the texture from MS?
Jonas, I usually run a high-pass filter on the albedo and then normalise the result and blend it with the normal map from the high res rock model. Only the sand in that image is MS.
Not sure if it's allowed to post photogrammetry rocks here, but here goes anyway!
Raw unprocessed rock captured with my iphone 6s using the camera+ app which allows for shooting in .tiff and gives you ISO and Shutterspeed control. I then used VisualSFM and Meshlab to process the actual images into a model. Next step is cleaning it up and making it game ready.
brand new zbrush user, a year or two into maya and years in Vue. Wanting to do environmental modelling and you guys are inspiring, thank you. Will be adding my own as I learn. may not be very good for awhile but will get there Cheers, Scott
Very nice, may i ask what the classic pipeline is?
Hey Jonas, a classic high poly/retopo/texturing worklow (what I meant is more: no photogrammetry or scan things). 3ds Max/zBrush for the high and low poly, then Substance Designer to create a base "rock" material and I used Substance Painter for the final texturing .
Been chipping away at this rock smart material for a while. This stuff is hard! I've made quite a few smart materials before this one, but they ended up being a little more stylized than what I was pushing for. Hope this one looks a bit more convincing. Really works best with deep crags and heavier cleavage. Not so great for smoother/flatter rocks. The heavy staining in the cracks really gives it character I think. When I'm satisfied with it I might release it. Made and rendered in Substance Painter 2.
@AGD Your rocks are DOPE ! I haven't seen that great in ages ! (well... still a lot of other Awesome stuff here too!) Can you share about your process ? (full zbrush ? what king of brushes did you used at first/at the end?... etc )
This thread is invaluable for inspiration. Currently working on my 3rd year project 'Fringe' ( Workthread here, http://www.3dhit.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=28595&page=4 ) with 2 others and I've been tasked with creating all of the organic assets. Building unique and interesting modular rock sets is freaking hard but so much fun as well.
I've been trying to come up with a sort of 'swiss army' rock, ie one that has multiple surfaces so that you can twist and turn it in engine to build up unique cliff faces. I'm really not sure if it's a good or even feasible method, but either way I'm getting some good practice out of it. If you have any advice, please tell me
crit welcome
Zbrush Hi Poly.
Here's the rocks updated with a nearly finished and textured look.
Another small Edit: I put together a snow material that blends based on the rock's normal map and is always on top so easy for laying out, looks much nicer than the above shot's snow. Still needs some polish.
The results of a 3D scan made from pictures I took on my phone, no other equipment was used. Reality Capture, 3DSMax and Photoshop for de-lighting and PBR texture extraction. That post is up now
Not sure if this is appropriate for this thread but I have some questions about rocks..!
I'm doing a beach scene and am in the process of blocking out my rocks. The two main questions I ask myself is; What shape should these rocks have and how should they be placed in the scene?
The rocks in the scene I imagine as being mid-size (appropriate for cover and smaller), scattered around the beach. There are tons of different looking rocks though (smooth, pointy, flat, wave-erosured) and I would love to know what determines the shape of the rock, or rather what shape a rock should have in what situation. Also it's easy to start thinking level design when placing the rocks, but I want to know how and why rocks are placed the way they are.
If anyone got any hints or know where to find out about this, please let me know
It's a pretty tricky question, I do believe making realistic rock formations is one of the hardest thing environment artist can do. Every case is unique. It's impossible give proper advice without good references. These are the key, gather as many references as you can. From there you'll realise how every rock is unique. You obviously cannot make all of them. You'll have to understand what are the key features of these rock formations. Then you can create more generic rocks that will suit your references. It can pretty pretty hard to find a good balance between generic and reusable on one hand and unique and realistic on the other. And then you have to take performance and level design into consideration, I worked on the beach scene in Forza Horizon 3, at some point we had to get rid of most of the rocks because they kept blocking the car, so we had to cleverly put them in places the player could easily see but never really had to go to.
If you can post some references, I'll try to help you further
Furthermore, I'll take this opportunity to post some rocks I have done lately (I didn't know this thread was still running!) These are displaced using tileable photogrammetry textures I made, I don't know if I can call them procedural, but they're far more re-usable than classic photogrammetric rocks.
Yeah, I realize I should do 1 or 2 different rocks and re-use them as much as possible. Otherwise I'll spend my days modelling rocks till I die. I'm just not sure how to motivate the "design" I'll choose. I have gathered references, but they're kind of all over the place I feel. Again, I look for rocks by the beach and can't seem to find a theme. I also have had a hard time finding references for how the rocks are placed on the beach. Anyway, references: I'm really digging the "angled" (for a lack of better word) rocks (bottom, middle) as a backdrop, and was thinking to keep that style of rock for the rocks on the beach itself. Top and bottom right got some more of these type of angled rocks that are on the actual beach. I also like the slant rocks (bottom left) for a sort of plateau to bring some elevation to the gameplay (think FPS).
But as I said, in all these references, the rocks just seem kind of randomly scattered around the place. There must be some reason they ended up where they are!
I think you first need to narrow your references to one geographical area. Rocks vary a lot from one place to another, due to climate, geology etc... According to your references, I'd probably have a look at either south west coast of Portugal or alongside the Great Ocean Road near Port Campbell in Victoria, Australia. Of course these are just two guesses. Rather than using google images, where most of the pictures have been properly framed, use google street view instead, it really helps having a broader look and understand how rocks are placed.
Are you going for a realistic or cartoon look? The bottom middle picture is already pretty cartoon, it may be pretty hard to make it fit a realistic scene.
You're absolutely right that I've been looking a lot at Portugal for inspiration, trying to narrow it down. I'll try to narrow it down even further. Using google street is a great idea.
I'm going for a realistic look. I did a quick sketch of how I imagine the composition, with the angled mountains in the background (blue): Do you think those mountains will look too cartoony? I think it can frame the scene nicely and add some scale if that makes sense
Edit: If this is clogging up or is off topic, please let me know and I'll stop
I personally do not think this is off topic, this thread is about creating rocks, but making a boulder is not even half of the work, creating a whole formation/scene is where the hard work needs to be put! However it may be more interesting for you to start your own thread
What I usually do when creating such a scene, before even sketching, is looking at a lot of pictures from professional photographers. The reason is simple, they are much better at framing and creating a good composition than we are. I'm not saying to copy what they do, but try to think how you could use the same principles they use on your own scene. So have a look at these two links : 1 & 2. Do not think about the type of rock but rather where they put it in the frame.
They are two main things I would consider : Do you really want to put your point of interest in the center of the scene? This is pretty uncommon, and, if you look at the previous references it always has a very good purpose when done. The other thing I'd consider is to put a manmade object, this can go from a wooden pier to a lighthouse, the goal is to add a little bit of story / interest
Been following this thread for a long time now and it just occurred to me that I have worked on some rocks of my own. These were for a stylized student project.
Replies
Higher res images and Marmoset Viewer here:
https://petemcnally.com/2016/09/01/quigleys-rock/
And speaking of textures, does anyone have some good tips on making them as hires, crisp, clean as possible? Since im still new in this 3d universe, im trying to find my way around things, and as i understood, i should strive for using as much uv space as possible and also go with a fairly high texture resolution like 4096x4096, but still with this resolution i see my textures pretty blurred out and pixelated. Are there other ways to tweak this to look better? Besides obviously adding detail texturing in the shader (i work with UE4).
@jonas_molgaard There's a couple ways to squeeze out more detail on your rocks.
One way is using detail textures to tile over your base mesh. Most modern game engines support it and I use it on all of my rocks in UE4.
The thing I'm becoming more of a fan of though, especially with really large rocks, is generating several tileable textures and then creating an RGB mask (I use Substance Painter) to control where those tiling textures appear. I also use a base texture/baked normal but since the tileables do most of the work you can be free to use lower resolution baked textures. If done well it'll be really crisp and pristine, however the material is quite a bit more complex than an ordinary material so you'll probably want to use it fairly sparingly.
The first thing you should do is sculpt and texture your rock like you always do but just a base. It doesn't need to be perfect with amazing detail or anything, just a base as something to work off of.
At that point what I do is I make my tileable textures. What I do if I'm photosourcing is I make the textures/materials using bitmap 2 material 3 and then I go into photoshop with the albedo. Then I go to image<Adjustments<Match color and I match the color to my base. Usually I leave some room for color variation so I only do like a half match or so.
At that point what I do is I take everything into substance painter. I then apply the base material on the lowest layer and then the tileables subsequently on top. I also make sure to tile them at about what I want, however it doesn't really matter as they are there only for previewing.
At this point make all of the tileables invisible except one. Now apply a mask. What you can do at this point is add an effect and make a custom mask, or you can use one of the prebuilt masks (typically the prebuilt ones do well enough for me).
Once you're happy with how that mask is masked out, simply unhide the next tileable and do that one. For example you could have one type appear in the cavities, one that aligns to the z axis (such as a tileable snow texture), and one that appears on the edge highlights.
Now that you have the masks done you can now right click on each of your masks and export the mask. Then you will combine them into an rgb mask inside of photoshop.
Once you import the mask into unreal you can lerp between the different tileables using each channel of the rgb mask.
You can create multiple rgb masks to do as many layers as you want, however I would not recommend adding an alpha channel as that almost doubles the texture size. You'll get more bang for the buck by importing another texture.
One advantage here is the resolution of the mask usually isn't that big of a deal and can be pretty low resolution overall. On top of that you can ultimately ditch your base if you want and just have a baked normal and your tiling materials.
Anyways I hope that explanation helps.
One thing you can do to prevent the seams from cropping up is make sure only your base texture that has the seams painted out appear on the edges and cavities. If you've done your uv's well it should be seamless.
Feel free to add this to your YouTube series. Link your channel when you get a chance. I'd like to check it out.
Here's a link to my the rock series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT4SeajOa6mbtW1QNQBvImp8nm7UtIlmY . Please note that i still consider myself a beginner and every day find myself learning new stuff which is a good indication that lots of the stuff i show, is either only partially correct or maybe already outdated hehe. I started doing these videos as a way to document my findings while sharing some of it with fellow noobs like myself. In anyway, i'll give a beep when i've made the next episode.
I have been fascinated by painting rocks for a long time and now getting in to sculpting them.
Thank you @jonas_molgaard for the videos you made. I have watched 1/3 of the series and enjoyed it.
I bumped into similar problems with my mesh as you mentioned in video part 1 with the holes and details.
More Rock/Cliff pics here
https://www.artstation.com/artist/vejza
My gumroad
https://gumroad.com/vejza#
Raw unprocessed rock captured with my iphone 6s using the camera+ app which allows for shooting in .tiff and gives you ISO and Shutterspeed control. I then used VisualSFM and Meshlab to process the actual images into a model. Next step is cleaning it up and making it game ready.
Higher resolution available here : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/y64RJ
Cheers!
Cheers,
Scott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzfyeV52YHk
I've made quite a few smart materials before this one, but they ended up being a little more stylized than what I was pushing for. Hope this one looks a bit more convincing. Really works best with deep crags and heavier cleavage. Not so great for smoother/flatter rocks. The heavy staining in the cracks really gives it character I think. When I'm satisfied with it I might release it.
Made and rendered in Substance Painter 2.
Your rocks are DOPE ! I haven't seen that great in ages ! (well... still a lot of other Awesome stuff here too!)
Can you share about your process ? (full zbrush ? what king of brushes did you used at first/at the end?... etc )
more here: https://www.artstation.com/artist/shrogg
This thread is invaluable for inspiration.
Currently working on my 3rd year project 'Fringe' ( Workthread here, http://www.3dhit.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=28595&page=4 ) with 2 others and I've been tasked with creating all of the organic assets. Building unique and interesting modular rock sets is freaking hard but so much fun as well.
I've been trying to come up with a sort of 'swiss army' rock, ie one that has multiple surfaces so that you can twist and turn it in engine to build up unique cliff faces. I'm really not sure if it's a good or even feasible method, but either way I'm getting some good practice out of it. If you have any advice, please tell me
crit welcome
Zbrush Hi Poly.
Here's the rocks updated with a nearly finished and textured look.
Another small Edit:
I put together a snow material that blends based on the rock's normal map and is always on top so easy for laying out, looks much nicer than the above shot's snow. Still needs some polish.
First time posting on polycount, figured Id start with a rock.
Reality Capture, 3DSMax and Photoshop for de-lighting and PBR texture extraction.
That post is up now
Hey guys!
I've been inspired by this thread to make my own geological example.
First time trying this in ZBrush!
I want to quickly get better, any and all C+C is appreciated!
I'm doing a beach scene and am in the process of blocking out my rocks. The two main questions I ask myself is; What shape should these rocks have and how should they be placed in the scene?
The rocks in the scene I imagine as being mid-size (appropriate for cover and smaller), scattered around the beach. There are tons of different looking rocks though (smooth, pointy, flat, wave-erosured) and I would love to know what determines the shape of the rock, or rather what shape a rock should have in what situation. Also it's easy to start thinking level design when placing the rocks, but I want to know how and why rocks are placed the way they are.
If anyone got any hints or know where to find out about this, please let me know
It's a pretty tricky question, I do believe making realistic rock formations is one of the hardest thing environment artist can do. Every case is unique. It's impossible give proper advice without good references. These are the key, gather as many references as you can. From there you'll realise how every rock is unique. You obviously cannot make all of them. You'll have to understand what are the key features of these rock formations. Then you can create more generic rocks that will suit your references. It can pretty pretty hard to find a good balance between generic and reusable on one hand and unique and realistic on the other.
And then you have to take performance and level design into consideration, I worked on the beach scene in Forza Horizon 3, at some point we had to get rid of most of the rocks because they kept blocking the car, so we had to cleverly put them in places the player could easily see but never really had to go to.
If you can post some references, I'll try to help you further
Furthermore, I'll take this opportunity to post some rocks I have done lately (I didn't know this thread was still running!)
These are displaced using tileable photogrammetry textures I made, I don't know if I can call them procedural, but they're far more re-usable than classic photogrammetric rocks.
I explain more about the process on my dedicated thread
Yeah, I realize I should do 1 or 2 different rocks and re-use them as much as possible. Otherwise I'll spend my days modelling rocks till I die. I'm just not sure how to motivate the "design" I'll choose. I have gathered references, but they're kind of all over the place I feel. Again, I look for rocks by the beach and can't seem to find a theme. I also have had a hard time finding references for how the rocks are placed on the beach. Anyway, references:
I'm really digging the "angled" (for a lack of better word) rocks (bottom, middle) as a backdrop, and was thinking to keep that style of rock for the rocks on the beach itself. Top and bottom right got some more of these type of angled rocks that are on the actual beach. I also like the slant rocks (bottom left) for a sort of plateau to bring some elevation to the gameplay (think FPS).
But as I said, in all these references, the rocks just seem kind of randomly scattered around the place. There must be some reason they ended up where they are!
I think you first need to narrow your references to one geographical area. Rocks vary a lot from one place to another, due to climate, geology etc... According to your references, I'd probably have a look at either south west coast of Portugal or alongside the Great Ocean Road near Port Campbell in Victoria, Australia. Of course these are just two guesses.
Rather than using google images, where most of the pictures have been properly framed, use google street view instead, it really helps having a broader look and understand how rocks are placed.
Are you going for a realistic or cartoon look? The bottom middle picture is already pretty cartoon, it may be pretty hard to make it fit a realistic scene.
You're absolutely right that I've been looking a lot at Portugal for inspiration, trying to narrow it down. I'll try to narrow it down even further. Using google street is a great idea.
I'm going for a realistic look. I did a quick sketch of how I imagine the composition, with the angled mountains in the background (blue):
Do you think those mountains will look too cartoony? I think it can frame the scene nicely and add some scale if that makes sense
Edit: If this is clogging up or is off topic, please let me know and I'll stop
I personally do not think this is off topic, this thread is about creating rocks, but making a boulder is not even half of the work, creating a whole formation/scene is where the hard work needs to be put! However it may be more interesting for you to start your own thread
What I usually do when creating such a scene, before even sketching, is looking at a lot of pictures from professional photographers. The reason is simple, they are much better at framing and creating a good composition than we are. I'm not saying to copy what they do, but try to think how you could use the same principles they use on your own scene. So have a look at these two links : 1 & 2.
Do not think about the type of rock but rather where they put it in the frame.
They are two main things I would consider : Do you really want to put your point of interest in the center of the scene? This is pretty uncommon, and, if you look at the previous references it always has a very good purpose when done. The other thing I'd consider is to put a manmade object, this can go from a wooden pier to a lighthouse, the goal is to add a little bit of story / interest
Been following this thread for a long time now and it just occurred to me that I have worked on some rocks of my own. These were for a stylized student project.
Zbrush Sculpt:
Marmoset Render:
In engine:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/gubble
And some formations created using them.
This is my go at some rocks
______________________________________________
My artstation : https://www.artstation.com/artist/sublime
Also made some lava fields too: