Indeed this is superb mouth watering stuff. Nice sculpt. One question.
I like what you did here. Why not turn this into a tiling texture and fill in the extra UV viod with a tiling texture that could do the same thing your doing now?
Say hi to Alex (Env artist colleague of yours) for me.
yes, I could have done that, I could actually use this texture wherever it didnt need to have such a density of mesh. The purpose of the tutorial was mostly to show the mesh tiling instead of texture tiling, but you are definitely right. Thanks for pointing out.
yes, I could have done that, I could actually use this texture wherever it didnt need to have such a density of mesh. The purpose of the tutorial was mostly to show the mesh tiling instead of texture tiling, but you are definitely right. Thanks for pointing out.
Right on, I will send my hi!
Nice,
I do it alittle different but not too dissimilar. Instead of doing a one off bake, i just bake to a flat plain and use geo to pop out the details (after the fact) rather than baking to preset popped out geo normals. Both work very well but there are noticeable flaw in the method i do. UV stretching, etc, but i like it for the tiling versatility.
Your stuff is looking great. Looking forward to seeing more. Do you have a site up yet? I noticed the link was broken. Or was that on my end?
Yes, most people do like that. But as you said uv stretching is one the reasons. It's not just a matter of quality. But it also comes on the time being, and where this is going to be used. If a bit far away, I don't see why using this method at all. I can also myself merge the verts if this is going far
It can sometime depend on the engine used but i can understand where your coming from.
The only downside i can see is texel limitation. Your confiined to a single shape and size ratio. You can only scale so far and use detail normal maps so much before it become "strange".
Actually, if you don't mind a crit, I went back to the first page and i did notice that your UV's are a single projection. And from what i can tell, very minimal UV stretching if any. So, theoretically, you could get away with a fully tiling texture with this method and in essence, have your cake and eat it too. Of course, an downside to that would be not being able to use the top and bottom portion of the texture to creating a "top and bottom" form as you do so well now.
I see what you mean, but how will you measure exactly the verts that are going out? Baking flat will take the tangency space normal map out a bit of what is there. The inside vertices are going to bend, even if almost invisible, the specularity might show that the inside edge is harder than what was supposed to be. It DOES work, I'm not saying it doesn't.
Another reason is that I can retopology right away from the high mesh instead of having to "guess" where the rock will pop. I don't want to dissagree with your method at all, both methods here work. It's a matter of preference and time consuming I believe. I will also agree that if you want to tile top/down, left/right you could do it flat since you are going to do an entire set with it.
As for the tiling the texture, I totally agree I could have done that.
Forgive my rambllings. I LOVE talking about organic creations. I LOVE rocks. :P
Rocks to me seem to be the only odd ball in 3d that could take on millions of forms. At least from my point of view. :P
To answer you question about how to gauge what is popping out:
...I would do exactly what your doing now but, make it fulling tiling. That way from distances you could get those nice deformations and 3d look while up close you get what your getting now. The only sacrifice i see is with how your molding the top and bottom details. But the biggest advantage is you could take your wall and re purpose into a house or castle wall, or maybe even a ground path. That's when i like to get into blending.
One off's tend to be really awesome with LOD transitions i think.
Surething man! Me too, and the discussion we are having here is AWESOME, makes me thing on how I can improve as well! I do believe doing your method is great for customization, YES! I want to actually use your method for some specific things someday!
I wonder if I can't do what you are saying by far away by merging my vertices to create a "LOD" perhaps? (if I had my texture tiled of course). Please let me know if you see any downside of it. I could see that I wouldn't be able to blend I believe... well I could but then I would have to exactly know where this would blend on the vertex color, and that's too much work...
Thanks for pointing this stuff out, this is a really good chat for me. If you have any more ideas please let me know.
With something like what your making, i manually model a few elements and assemble them in Maya. Then i take them into zbrush, sculpt, poly decimate, then back into maya for baking.
If I was a rock eater, I would have already chomped all your delicious tutorials right up. Fantastic work and thanks very much for sharing your work processes! The material is definitely inspiring in all the right ways.
Great job man! Like others have said, awesome tutorial and awesome results. I really like this method because it is the most artistic way of doing it. It might take a bit longer, but you can't beat these results. I love how there are so many ways of approaching rock walls though. Great share!
i may have already commented on this thread.. but i need to again. thx so much for that tut. it was very helpful. i tried it out yesterday and it seemed to come out decent enough.. i think i may have skipped one of the final tiling steps but thats ok.. im sure ill try it a few more times. one thing im curious about however.. what is your general workflow for texturing something like this? do you handpaint most of it in photoshop using grungy brushes, or use a few photo sources for small detail, and let the bakes take care of the rest?
This is just a guess, not that i know his work flow, but i would assume 30 to 40% of it starts out with basic geo transfer data. AO, Cavity, Albeto, Normals. All of which are layered in Photoshop. Then use basic low contrast photo references to fill in the albeto portion. That's how i would do it. Can't wait to see how he does it.
Yes, mostly are cavity masks from the curves I do in zbrush, after that I bring all of them to photoshop or any paiting software and start putting some layers of photo source from cgtextures. I usually create a snow mask in Maya so I can put dust or Snow as I did on this example. Hope that helps. I can someday do a more explainable tut for texturing this. I'm sure there are workflows better than mine tho.
Replies
I like what you did here. Why not turn this into a tiling texture and fill in the extra UV viod with a tiling texture that could do the same thing your doing now?
Say hi to Alex (Env artist colleague of yours) for me.
Right on, I will send my hi!
Nice,
I do it alittle different but not too dissimilar. Instead of doing a one off bake, i just bake to a flat plain and use geo to pop out the details (after the fact) rather than baking to preset popped out geo normals. Both work very well but there are noticeable flaw in the method i do. UV stretching, etc, but i like it for the tiling versatility.
Your stuff is looking great. Looking forward to seeing more. Do you have a site up yet? I noticed the link was broken. Or was that on my end?
Thanks man! Yes I do, my domain is down for now, here's a link: http://raveal.net/p/25976
The only downside i can see is texel limitation. Your confiined to a single shape and size ratio. You can only scale so far and use detail normal maps so much before it become "strange".
Actually, if you don't mind a crit, I went back to the first page and i did notice that your UV's are a single projection. And from what i can tell, very minimal UV stretching if any. So, theoretically, you could get away with a fully tiling texture with this method and in essence, have your cake and eat it too. Of course, an downside to that would be not being able to use the top and bottom portion of the texture to creating a "top and bottom" form as you do so well now.
What do you think?
Another reason is that I can retopology right away from the high mesh instead of having to "guess" where the rock will pop. I don't want to dissagree with your method at all, both methods here work. It's a matter of preference and time consuming I believe. I will also agree that if you want to tile top/down, left/right you could do it flat since you are going to do an entire set with it.
As for the tiling the texture, I totally agree I could have done that.
Btw: your sculpts are awesome.
Rocks to me seem to be the only odd ball in 3d that could take on millions of forms. At least from my point of view. :P
To answer you question about how to gauge what is popping out:
...I would do exactly what your doing now but, make it fulling tiling. That way from distances you could get those nice deformations and 3d look while up close you get what your getting now. The only sacrifice i see is with how your molding the top and bottom details. But the biggest advantage is you could take your wall and re purpose into a house or castle wall, or maybe even a ground path. That's when i like to get into blending.
One off's tend to be really awesome with LOD transitions i think.
I wonder if I can't do what you are saying by far away by merging my vertices to create a "LOD" perhaps? (if I had my texture tiled of course). Please let me know if you see any downside of it. I could see that I wouldn't be able to blend I believe... well I could but then I would have to exactly know where this would blend on the vertex color, and that's too much work...
Thanks for pointing this stuff out, this is a really good chat for me. If you have any more ideas please let me know.
Love the stuff man. Keep it up.
you are too kind
Thanks for taking the time to share it with us
Thanks for sharing your workflow!
Love learning new techniques.
Added to the wiki:
http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting#Tiled_Sculpting
http://wiki.polycount.com/TilingRockWallBeyer
bugo when you get your site sorted out, let me know and I'll update the links.
Hey Thanks Eric! You can use this one for now: www.artbyhugo.com
Thanks for sharing this
Couple of posts above yours