Best way to go about modeling a brick rubble pile

biofrost · Feb 2012

I have been avoiding making a topic for what seems to be a easy thing to do but for the past day or so I have not been able to wrap my head around how to go about doing this.

I have this for my high poly(not taking it into zbrush). I am just not sure how I would go about making the low poly for it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Tokusei · Feb 2012

if you want all the bricks to be unique then its gonna take a while to retop and upwrap them individually

you could try creating the lowpoly for a couple of them, duplicate and scale them for variation. the reactor physics engine in 3dsmax can simulate them falling into a pile

MikeF · Feb 2012

i did something like this about a year ago for an ipad game

not the best example since it was insanely low poly, but i basically made about 4-5 variations of bricks, positioned them in an interesting way, copied, pasted, rotated and repeated until i had a decent pile.

low poly was just a simple block to cover the pile's silhouette as best as possible under my tri limit, but if i had more to spare i would have added a lot more edges and interesting shapes

CheeseOnToast · Feb 2012

You have a lot of undercuts and indents to deal with currently. Try re-arranging the blocks into a shape thst's more easily retopologised. Do you own Zbrush? If so, you can make a low-res unified skin from your high poly model then project all to act as a starting point for retopology. You'll notice that MikeF's examples are mostly positive shapes without many concave areas. Try something similar if you want an easier time of it. You can always have a couple of seperate loose bricks as well, to place around and push into the main shape.

Artist_in_a_box · Feb 2012

For that pile of bricks I would create 3 or 4 unique bricks bake them to low poly then arrange the low poly. If you think about it there are 6 sides to every brick so technically speaking you now have 24 bricks to play with from any one angle. You could also create a tiling rough brick texture and use it as the inside of any bricks you want to chip or break up inside.

For a wall or anything I would go down a totally different route but for a pile of bricks or rubble id do what I just described as its more cost effective.

If i was tot ake this into UDK I would also be tempted to create an AO layer by using the lightmap UV set and multiplying that over my diffuse layer. I would then add some slight colour or shade variations to the bricks to add even more variation.

biofrost · Feb 2012

Thanks you guys! Some great advice going on here.

I think the bake turned out good, and like CheeseOnToast said I can place some low bicks around the pile to give make it a bit more realistic.

Might not be enough bricks or what I do have are too large but I think I have the basics down?

Artist_in_a_box · Feb 2012

I cant really see the sillhouette of that so from this angle it more or less looks like a rectangle with a curved middle.

I am not too sure as to the purpose or the polycount for this but lookig at what you have made I would say you would be better to throw more polygons at that to get a better sillhouette for the low res.

For the kind of mesh you have created there I think my workflow would be to create a few high res bricks. I would probably sculpt the bricks just to add more detail too.

I would then arrange them and clone them apropriately to create the shape I wanted (like you have done here before baking) However instead of manually creating my Low res model as you have done here I would instead clone the high res bricks onto a new layer, hide the original and quadify them to give them a lot of polygons.

I would then slect brick by brick and use pro boolean to merge them together. Do this with all of the bricks until you ave one solid mesh. This is a messy process but works better when you have a lot of faces and as long as you dont have any bottlenecks or little holes in the mesh that are like small caves you will be fine. If there are any little pot holes like this just delete the insides of them and cap the entrance, they will bake fine.

Once you have this I would use pro optimize to remove any excess verts. (You dont really need to lower the percentage as pro optimize wil remove unused verts anyway)

Then take that mesh into meshlab (google it, tis a free tool) and optimize it as much as you can without altering the sillhouette.

Hey presto you have a low res mesh that closely matches your high res and has a good sillhouette. UV however you like, my poreffered methos is just a pelt map but different strokes for different folks on that.

From there on bake as normal.

Sorry if im way off base but that would be my way to attack this. It is only one of many different ways of course but for me that would be the fastest.

biofrost · Feb 2012

Thnak you, im in the process of trying that out right now! I should have showed though that for the low res mesh I actually did a different high res. For that one it was just a pile of broken bricks so there is not much sillhuette to it.

Anyways there is no particular reason for doing this, just looked at what kind of stuff I have done and wanted to try something new.

Eric Chadwick · Feb 2012

Some good ideas from Michael 'Orb' Vicente
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1321690#post1321690

Also check out the 2nd one here, from Timothee Yeramian
http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting#Rock_and_Stone

Best way to go about modeling a brick rubble pile

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