Floating sky rocks

InvertedVantage

This is a continuation of the project I was working on with my aircraft WIPs. I got so much help with that, which improved the quality immensely. I was hoping I could get the same with this?

The concept is this floating collection of rocks with a small town on this large central mountain, and then these floating rock pillars that are tethered to the center piece. I've never really been great at organic modeling, and while I at least have a *result* this time around, it's not exactly very good; as my friend said, it's a rock, but it's a blobbish rock.

Here's the concept, sorry for the awful webcam picture, I'm not near my scanner. This model is the pillar with the horizontal line (it's going to be a runway) running through it;







So yea, I know I can do a lot more with this, I was just wondering how. I haven't even gotten into painting the displacement/bump maps on (how should I go about doing the normals? Can I paint them, or should I do something else?).

Thanks for any help.

InvertedVantage

Trying out Sculptris (first time I've used a sculpting tool for a real project); any improvement?
C&C very much appreciated, first time I've really done something organic like this.

konstruct

Id make a nice, normal mapped rock (don't worry about the resolution breaking down) but then make sure you apply a detail normal to carry the high frequency detail.

So you`ed have the main geometry which would be your large forms.
The baked out normal map would be your medium forms.
And finally the detail normal to handle the small forms.

Also:
this is my favorite method for making rocks to date:

InvertedVantage

I couldn't utilize that tutorial, the displacement maps don't seem to work the same way in modo like in Max (they seem to only add to the sphere's surface, instead of cutting through it like in Max). Though I did make a high res sculpt and bake a normal map off of it; so cool! I don't understand, though, how should I go about a detail normal?

Polycount is about 2,800;

InvertedVantage

I know I'm self-bumping this, I hope it's ok.



Progress so far. Wondering how I should go about detailing the machinery bits?

mdeforge

This thread may interest you greatly: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83605

I'm off to bed, sorry I can't add more feedback. I'll check this thread tomorrow.