Creating a stone fireplace

taholmes160

I am working on a project that has several fireplaces. In the past, I have just built a mesh object, and put a rock texture on it. The problem with this is that rocks on the corners and in other places dont match up correctly and I can never get things to look right.

What I would like to do is to actually build it rock by rock. The mortar is easy to do, but Im not sure how to create the rocks – I have messed with the rock generator in blender a bit, but I cant seem to get the correct shapes to the rocks – so im looking for the right way to make the rocks.

Below are a couple example fireplaces

another caveman

 The problem with this is that rocks on the corners and in other places dont match up correctly and I can never get things to look right.

You need it to be a single patch, one natural UV unwrap

kanga

What are you using? I googled: zbrush stone wall, and got a lot of results.

Mink

It may take a long time to get looking right, but if you have substance designer, create a graph that can generate your rocks with an inputted grayscale map to define rock regions and outputs distinct rocks in closed off area. Then I recommend creating a continuous UV for the rock surface, and then filling in white lines where you want the boundaries to be. It's tedious, but can definitely be accomplished with a fairly old version of substance designer. For added effect, you may want to do some basic modeled protrusions once you have the final material applied. Or before.

Eric Chadwick

Late reply here, but I'd suggest looking into procedural approaches, perhaps Voronoi
https://styly.cc/tips/blender/nimi-blender-voronoi/

oglu

Why not model some stones and build it this way? 

poopipe

Eric Chadwick said:

Late reply here, but I'd suggest looking into procedural approaches, perhaps Voronoi
https://styly.cc/tips/blender/nimi-blender-voronoi/

The traditional voronoi tends towards giving you unnatural looking pinch points between cells - you can usually find a seed that looks ok but it's not something you can rely on as a general solution. This is the case with anything based around perlin or uniform distributions, which is a bit of a bugger since that's what almost everything in the universe is based around
A poisson based distribution is IMO a better starting point for something like this as it keeps a much more regular distance between points. 

There's a very nice free poisson distribution package available for substance designer (I forget the name of the author and I'm sorry)  that i recommend grabbing.