Some good approaches to modular worn castle walls?

jordank95

Looking to create some worn old castle walls and just looking to see if anyone has some good workflows for this. I need some portions of these to connect to one another.

One plan is to sculpt in zbrush then just use a tiling rock material to texture the stones/grout. Is this a good approach? My main concern is getting each modular piece to match up and connect to one another and I might have an issue if I sculpted rather than started with a "castle wall" tiling texture. I feel that if I didnt use zbrush and just modeled in Maya, then used a stone wall tiling texture and just cut around the stones to create that rubble/broken feel, it wouldnt be as good. 

Just looking to see some approaches to this. Thanks

zachagreg

Approach something like this in steps. First layout your grid and the find the pieces that you will need to fit within the grid. Don't worry too much about materials at this point just focus on getting the pieces to a point where they can be snapped together and you have all of your necessary wall sizes and corner angles. 

After that you can either do it in zbrush or in maya and start breaking up the silhouettes of each piece in such a way that you are essentially breaking up 2 pieces at once. It's probably easiest to subtract from one piece in order to fit with another or have 1 or 2 "patterns" of stones that you would essentially use as endcaps to join any two pieces.

I would advise to always take stones or bricks through zbrush to get nice looking normals and variety and to add the micro detail. After you've got hat would essentially be the high poly and the lowpoly of your pieces you can polygroup them or material ID them in order to generate masks to start laying your materials.   

Some excellent breakdown for this type of thing : http://www.cgsociety.org/news/article/2493/warrior-s-pilgrimage-breakdown-by-arif-pribadi

Also @alloa did some nice work on some modular stone pieces a while back: https://polycount.com/discussion/88996/my-work-at-pi/p1

jordank95

zachagreg said:

After that you can either do it in zbrush or in maya and start breaking up the silhouettes of each piece in such a way that you are essentially breaking up 2 pieces at once. It's probably easiest to subtract from one piece in order to fit with another or have 1 or 2 "patterns" of stones that you would essentially use as endcaps to join any two pieces.

thanks for the tips! though a bit confused about this part...what do you mean break up two pieces at once? You mean so they can essentially fit together like puzzle pieces? Then have a couple other mesh pieces as end caps?

So I get this I think. Then once I have my high and low poly pieces, I can texture them in Painter...then maybe blend with a tiling stone texture for some micro detail?

zachagreg

Here is a picture explaining more of the end caps. 
From source: http://walkera3d.blogspot.com/2015/10/
A lot of good info in that blog on entire process. Basically the red and blue are the end caps, so technically everything in the green can be tiling while the red and blue act as a standard silhouette breakup which means that you won't have each piece trying to fit together with every other piece, rather you would only have to match the tiling with the red silhouette.

 The green can even be a plane with the red and blue caps if you were to bake out a tiling material. But not so much the process you're looking for I think.

jordank95 said:

So I get this I think. Then once I have my high and low poly pieces, I can texture them in Painter...then maybe blend with a tiling stone texture for some micro detail?

Exactly, you can also do micro detail in zbrush since you're going to be baking out the normal map anyway but it's whatever is more comfortable for your workflow. You can also throw the height and normal information into Substance Designer and a make a whole lot of variations of stone materials as well.

Edit: Benjamin Roach did an excellent recreation of a DS3 environment with modular castle walls as well. https://80.lv/articles/dark-souls-3-in-ue4-production-interview/

jordank95

@zachagreg hmm, I lilke this approach, though I think what I currently did was kind of similar. My texel density is 5.12 per meter, so a 2k texture fits and tiles seamlessly for my 12x12 meter modular walls. I made my texture in Designer, so I can use my height map for displacement. I can then create a couple different end caps by cutting around the stones so make those uneven end caps like in the red areas posted above. Though im not sure this is the best approach. Doing this in zbrush would get me better results, especially for the end caps.

I was also able to use vertex painting with my method...not sure how I would go about it with this process?

Hmm, I think I might scrap my original pieces and try the above method. I think it just might look better in the end. Seems that doing this from actual geometry rather than using a tiling texture will just get better results.

zachagreg

Yea there are always several different ways to approach a situation like this. At the end of the day do what will make your work look best and fits the criteria you have, some methods are better for performance some are better from an artistic standpoint. Just wanted to shed some light on the some of the methods for you. If you are going to scrap what you have maybe try to divide the pieces up and then use nanomesh with an IMM to quickly generate 5-6 stones on the big faces. That way you won't have to hand place every stone but rather just tweak them.