Rock Sculpting
polycounter lvl 2
Hi there! Yeah yeah, I know, rocks again.
So for the past few days i've been researching rock sculpts for personal project, found this awesome thread which has many good advices, and I feel like i've watched every video tutorial there is (I hope not), here are my results, using zbrush TrimSmoothBorder brush, ClayBuildup, Dam_standard, and TrimDynamic for small borders
It still is quite tricky and I can't say that i'm in love with results. I used ClayPolish at the end of the sculpts, so it does look quite stylized. They are dynameshed roughly at 300-700k polys each. Then I decimated / Zremeshed these guys and made simple texture layouts for them in maya, baked normal maps in xnormal. Here is one of them
with some others i didn't bother with UV at all, kinda curious what kind of clusterfuck trouble I will run into later
I was so impressed with ZRemesher results that i decided to leave it as it is for one or two of them, so poorly optimised, just, again, for the sake of it
and then my great mind decided that it is an awesome idea to build a wall out of these. Aaaand make it a separate object. Aaaand make it out of the high poly models for these. To decimate and UV later. Here is my wall of Death
I still have gtx 570 (yeah, when is that sapphire nitro OC RX 480 is coming anyway?), 16 GB of RAM though (certainly not the fast one, DDR3-2000ish i think), i7-3770k and with MUCH struggle and frustration, anger and fear, i've gone through making this wall by deleting the backfaces and dynameshing in zbrush. I think the biggest problem was with the backface, got a LOT of crashes with this one. Here it is
took a little while to figure out how to flatten (it still certainly isn't perfect) the back. After much struggle i think i used the dumbest method ever: claybuildup the crap out of it to trimcurve the excess parts. Didn't want to lose details with dynamesh and couldn't mask properly the facing side so haven't used it to close the remaining holes. This gave me another headache later, when i got it decimated
It is a mess with all the interior faces, but many of them are kinda needed because the wall itself has deep holes in it
The UV layout is a total disaster with a lot of stitches and i don't know how I will texture it. Normal bake is hard, too, because the rays hit neighboring rocks and it comes out with a lot of glitches
believe me, it's not the worst one!
My plan is to make a landscape in UE4, place these guys out with some normal map overlays for small details, tinker a bit with the material nodes. Seen this kind of thing done in this Digital-Tutors tutorial.
Don't know what to do with the wall though, I think i've completely wasted at least half of hard stressing work day yesterday on it.
So here is that, hope you had a good laugh and won't make the same mistakes again.
How could i make it better? Should i make the wall out of completed rocks in the engine? What about backfaces? Do you have other suggestions or can share your rock sculpting technique/tutorials that helped you?
Sorry for the wall of text, and if there is anything wrong with this post
So for the past few days i've been researching rock sculpts for personal project, found this awesome thread which has many good advices, and I feel like i've watched every video tutorial there is (I hope not), here are my results, using zbrush TrimSmoothBorder brush, ClayBuildup, Dam_standard, and TrimDynamic for small borders
It still is quite tricky and I can't say that i'm in love with results. I used ClayPolish at the end of the sculpts, so it does look quite stylized. They are dynameshed roughly at 300-700k polys each. Then I decimated / Zremeshed these guys and made simple texture layouts for them in maya, baked normal maps in xnormal. Here is one of them
with some others i didn't bother with UV at all, kinda curious what kind of clusterfuck trouble I will run into later
I was so impressed with ZRemesher results that i decided to leave it as it is for one or two of them, so poorly optimised, just, again, for the sake of it
and then my great mind decided that it is an awesome idea to build a wall out of these. Aaaand make it a separate object. Aaaand make it out of the high poly models for these. To decimate and UV later. Here is my wall of Death
I still have gtx 570 (yeah, when is that sapphire nitro OC RX 480 is coming anyway?), 16 GB of RAM though (certainly not the fast one, DDR3-2000ish i think), i7-3770k and with MUCH struggle and frustration, anger and fear, i've gone through making this wall by deleting the backfaces and dynameshing in zbrush. I think the biggest problem was with the backface, got a LOT of crashes with this one. Here it is
took a little while to figure out how to flatten (it still certainly isn't perfect) the back. After much struggle i think i used the dumbest method ever: claybuildup the crap out of it to trimcurve the excess parts. Didn't want to lose details with dynamesh and couldn't mask properly the facing side so haven't used it to close the remaining holes. This gave me another headache later, when i got it decimated
It is a mess with all the interior faces, but many of them are kinda needed because the wall itself has deep holes in it
The UV layout is a total disaster with a lot of stitches and i don't know how I will texture it. Normal bake is hard, too, because the rays hit neighboring rocks and it comes out with a lot of glitches
believe me, it's not the worst one!
My plan is to make a landscape in UE4, place these guys out with some normal map overlays for small details, tinker a bit with the material nodes. Seen this kind of thing done in this Digital-Tutors tutorial.
Don't know what to do with the wall though, I think i've completely wasted at least half of hard stressing work day yesterday on it.
So here is that, hope you had a good laugh and won't make the same mistakes again.
How could i make it better? Should i make the wall out of completed rocks in the engine? What about backfaces? Do you have other suggestions or can share your rock sculpting technique/tutorials that helped you?
Sorry for the wall of text, and if there is anything wrong with this post