Making stone walls methods

iikii

Hi, is it recommended to model a stone wall game asset using these many rocks objects such as the model in the link below?

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-model-stonewall-corner/864621

The poly count may be a problem but adding a LOD will make it usable in a game?

I am curious to what is the right or best method to making these types of assets?

thanks

Epitaph

Depends on its use. Most typical applications/uses would just be with a procedural texture, maybe with displacement/tessellation. Your method you mentioned would be more-so for large rock faces on cliffwalls, mountains etc.

iikii

oh i see, thanks.

For this stone wall, i am guessing the artist uses both tessellation texture and rocks models to make it? Some of the parts around the edge and center is solid model.

Obscura

Im pretty sure on this last image, they had a tilung rock wall with no displacement and only the silhouette rocks are modeled as lowpoly rocks. 

Klunk

what are you modelling in ?

Eric Chadwick

A variety of techniques here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/EnvironmentSculpting

iikii

Obscura said:

Im pretty sure on this last image, they had a tilung rock wall with no displacement and only the silhouette rocks are modeled as lowpoly rocks. 

oh i see, thanks

Klunk said:

what are you modelling in ?

I am modeling using maya and zbrush but i am going to learn substance.

Eric Chadwick said:

A variety of techniques here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/EnvironmentSculpting

wow, awesome thanks!

Mark Dygert

So a "game ready" wall built out of individual bricks is a bad idea. You can't LOD that down without merging the bricks, which is something you should have already done. It's wasting a ton of tris and crunching it will only open up gaps and turn the bricks into mush while never really getting it into the optimized ranges you'll need for those highest LODs.

The number of textures isn't using is way too high for game development so you'll need to combine them or bake it down, but baking it down is going to destroy the look that that's driving most of it's detail.

That method MIGHT work to generate a high poly mesh that you can use to bake a low poly but that particular model is stuck in the middle ground and not really doing either job particularly well. Plus it's a corner section, that doesn't tile so it's pretty much useless...