Stone tiles - feedback?

capone

Just practicing with creating stone. Curious if this is working or not. I use dynamic trim to create edges, then detail them using clay buildup and malletfast. Once the edges look ok I use orb cracks along with the clay/mallet brushes along with flatten.

I've yet to add general 'noise'.

Tobbo

Looks like a good start. Try not to get sucked in with the little details. Try and work from big forms to smaller ones. There's really no need to get really microscopic in detail.

capone

Update, how is this?

edit : Clicking on 'noise' in my surface tool crashes causes zbrush to crash every time. Have tried initialize among other things, got it to work once but then scrapped it as I wanted to do it on a layer. Tried everything, crashed about 30 times on me. So I guess that's not an option. (ZBr6). 8 mil polys on high, 133k on low. Both crash.

capone

Added some subtle noise (not wanting this to be super real/beat up etc) Good idea to keep it?

unit187

Maybe make bigger/deeper cracks? Those seem to be too thin and shallow at this moment.

Visceral

I have always had trubble with making cracks like that. How do you do it?

SaboR1996

Visc, i'm guessing he just varies the pressure on his tablet, that seems how most people seem to get it to look right

capone

I have some cracks that open up and go deep but I'm guessing that you're talking about the 'hairline' cracks? I can try opening them up a bit. I do see hair line cracks in other artists work, so not entirely sure if opening them all up is the way forward here?

Also thinking of making the set look less perfectly flat? Like it's actually been trodden on slightly.



As for how I did the cracks. There is a bit of personal technique going on, involves orb brush and malletfast. I draw lines and then go in with extra strokes where I think the crack would open up. Then use malletfast to 'bite' into the rest of the stone.

Fenyce

I really like the sculpt so far!

stevston89

I think it's looking nice. I think you want to make the shapes less uniform. All of the stones you have make a very neat rectangle ( the edges are all at a 90 degree angle). Stones are not that perfect unless they are machine cut.

capone

I'm loosely following a tutorial based on this tileset and they seem to carry off the neat corners. These would have been created by 'man'. The setting is an old castle type affair.

Spoon

Its a really nice sculpt. I like the feel.
I think, if you have it on a layer/morph, that you could benefit from removing some of the damage again, actually. IMO you got a little carried away, but I guess it can be beneficial if you are tilling it a ton.
Another thing you can consider, is giving the slabs a slight rotation, so they dont all look directly at the cam, when you are doing the bake - if that makes sense.

capone

I think rotating slabs could be dangerous, especially the outer ones as they are currently set up for tiling. It could work if very subtle, like no more than 5% rotation. I will explore this idea at the baking stage.

I do have morph so can try knocking back the details a bit. When you say I got carried away are you specifically talking about the sides? or the top surfaces? or both?

capone

Hmmm not sure about where this is going. Adding more dents (all over)and deeper cracks (started with the 2 slabs near the bottom). I think I'm just losing something now. I much prefer the 'flat' sculpt from above. Maybe I'll be able to add volume in the texture pass?

SaboR1996

I'm guessing your following the article in the vertex magazine?

capone

Yep, the general pipeline at least. I'm open to exploring different style/material etc

Jonas Ronnegard

haven't read the other comments, but at the moment cracks and damage is all in the same size and depth, getting some bigger damages etc and getting some more undamaged areas would help i think.

Spoon

Jonas Ronnegard wrote: »

haven't read the other comments, but at the moment cracks and damage is all in the same size and depth, getting some bigger damages etc and getting some more undamaged areas would help i think.

This was what I was trying to say

Yeah, even though it is tilable, you should be able to rotate it those 5 degree. I didnt mean big values. Just enough to break up the perfectly flat top surface I think you are doing great!

aizekg

Like it !

capone

My worry with that is that this will be tiled quite a bit, so if I do some really big cracks they may be really noticeable? Perhaps 3-4 slabs could have various deeper cracks.

capone

Have started to open up cracks and deepen some of the damage (On slabs with orange dots). Is this going in the right direction?

edit : btw I turned off the noise/dents as to only show you the cracks and get feedback on those.

capone

Think I'm done with the sculpt

Spoon

Looking great!

eedobaba7726

Not sure I agree at all with making the texture rotated like that. Having sharp diagonal lines can make texture aliasing a lot more noticable on lower levels of texture filtering. If the lines of the texture can line up with the pixel grid, they really should. Makes the texture scale better with mipmaps too.

Spoon

My suggestion was kinda vague. I am not suggesting to make the lines more diagonal by rotating around the axis from camera to tiles.

What I mean is, if you saw the tiles from profile, they would be 100% totally flat. My suggestion was to rotate them sliiightly, so when you bake the normals, if you disable the layers for cracks and stuff, there would still be slight variations between the bricks.