Philipk rocks

Sirdelita

Hey polycounters,

Been trying to nail down these tutorials of his, and I just cannot figure out how he did these piles or larger rocks using his workflow...

Anyone know of any more in depth versions of this??

Thanks!!

Justin Meisse

show us your attempts

PhattyEwok

I agree he does rock!!! WOOT GO PHILLIP K!!! lol but srs lez see em

PhilipK

Hi Sirdelita,

I'm afraid I don't have any iterations left one those ones. But I'll try and explain this with some new REALLY quick pics from max.
First of all, I actually used the same technique as with my other rocks (as in the rock tutorial) starting with a plane (or a very basic "blob") that I apply and uv correctly right from the start.
I made sure the texture is actually tiling seamlessly as well in case I go "above" the borders, because I don't want to be limited by the texture size and I REALLY don't want to scale the uvs so these rocks would have a lower pixel density than the other rocks in the set.

1. So first off, start with the plane and go crazy (a lot crazier than this example ) with the cut tool:



Imagine me having applied a basic texture there tho, with the cracks painted in. Keep the edge cutting to match the cracks and make sure you have "Preserve UVs" turned on while doing this (if you're in Maya I suppose there's a similar feature there probably) in case you wanna move around your edges some (or a lot).

2. Here I started moving the middle faces up. Make sure you have enough edges surrounding to do this without moving more geometry up than you want to. Don't worry about how your edges and vertices are placed now. You'll clean that up as you go later on. No use to have perfect loops before the base is done. I usually assign smoothing groups early on so I can see the shapes better at an early stage.


Remember you may need to adjust the uvs every now and then to make sure there's not too much stretching. I recommend doing this while building even at early stages if you don't wan to end up with a total mess in the end.

3. I started chamfering edges WAY too early here of course.. It looks like shit But you get the point I hope. Once you feel somewhat happy with the rock shapes, start chamfering to create some harder edges. Remember while doing this your uv may take some hits as well so make sure to fix that stretching pretty early as well so it won't be impossible to work with later. Also, remember you can cut your uv as much as you want on a "per stone" basis as you have already got a natural seam there with the smoothing cut and the texture cracks.


I hope this explained the basic idea of it at least. It's just the same idea as in the rock tutorial I have on my site, just applied a bit "deeper".

Huw_Dawson

I loved those tutorials Philip. Any chance you could link this thread at the bottom of that tutorial?

Sirdelita

Phillip as said above you rock!!

my first attempt is attached and thrown into UDK!

Mark Dygert

Yeah he does!

Sirdelita, it looks good
Do you have a wireframe we can look at? You might be able to round out a few of the sharper edges.

Sirdelita

awww vig, anything for you!

(ill upload it today)