[Zbrush] How would you approach sculpting soil?

tester1225

Hi guys, you ever just spend like 5 hours sculpting something and the results are nice but not quite what you were going for? Yeah having one of those days and I feel like I'm losing it lol I'm trying to sculpt some dry crumply soil, and I'm referring to pictures like this one: 
unfortunately I end up with either completely cracked desert sand or just generic ground if that makes sense lol I've tried playing with noise but it's a bit...lacking, I'm not sure how to put it. I did play with the idea of modeling a few crumples of ground and using nanomesh, but that just ended up looking like pebbles scattered everywhere. I'm probably just doing this completely wrong but I'm finding it a bit difficult to do without at least a reference tutorial to look at and see how someone else attempts something similar. What would be a potentially good way to approach this? I've briefly looked into using alphas as a base if I have to resort to mainly have all the bits hand sculpted, does anyone maybe have any alpha/brush recommendations that I could pick up? Any help will be appreciated as I really don't want to resort to cheating and just covering everything in grass! 

oglu

I wont sculpt it. Just a rough base and use substance to get the detail + color. 

Alex_J

Use reference photos and make it in substance or photoshop. Needs to be tileable. I can see no benefit to doing this.in zbeush. 

Laughing_Bun

If you do continue doing it in zbrush you should take advantage of dynamesh and projection. The image I see is a composite of a bunch of pebble like clumps and tiny stick debris, why not scatter some of those around, add some basic noise/alpha for the base dirt and dynamesh it all into something more blended together. 

tester1225

Sorry for taking a while to reply, but thank you for your response guys. I may potentially be overcomplicating how I approach this, I did a bit more indepth youtube search and found two lengthy tutorials on how to do create soil using substance designer, so I'll watch those first and see if I can use that tactic for the soil and then I'll see if I can do the additional item scattering with nanomesh.

Alex_J

Depending on size of.items youre scattering, that may be a thing to do in engine to avoid tiling and allow more artistic control.

For instance, small sticks may be best as geometry and scattered in engine both by algorithm and by hand. 

Mark Dygert

I would use substance designer.

https://80.lv/articles/forest-ground-substance-breakdown/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1s_H3qAzlk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwGm3cW6dM

gnoop

I did see very nice results people do with Substance Designer but Imo it's a huge time waste.   You would spend  days if not weeks for something looking truly realistic  and even  after that if would be instantly noticeable it's not a real thing   especially  being put next to texture done with photogrammetry. 

You coud make photogrammetry scanned piece of clumpy ground in your yard, litter it with small  geometry rubbish in any 3d soft , ( Zbrush is btw monstrously inconvenient for that, even Blender is much better)    render it   and it would still look much better than  procedural substance with fake details.  Would have better and more correct normal and height map , better AO, better subtle shading with correctly set sky light  etc.

With  cryptomatte AOV it would be insanely more convenient to do color tweaks than with a hell of a node mess SD usually is

I do use SD but only when I couldn't take my camera and do the shots