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HINTS & TIPS - rocks

kat · 12 · 39439

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Offline Savage

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Here is a good tutorial on making a rock in Blender, I think you will like it:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0ZRnly2RI

Also, my high poly sculpt is roughly 1.2 million I think and it does lag a little bit which brings me back to 2.5, I get almost twice that smoothly with 2.5. And the brush texture browser is much nicer as well. makes me sad about those scripts :( I'll post my alpha brushes I made when I get back in town. The video above tells you where to get some nice alpha brushes as well. I should be back tomorrow or Monday, talk to you all then.


Offline kat

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Nice vid but that's a 'bad' tutorial, unless he was just showing the principles of using the sculpt tool. The whole process of making a rock like that is rendered pretty pointless by loading in a diffuse image based on a photograph; it's much simpler and quicker to just tweak the photo he used and convert that into a normal map with CrazyBump or some other photo-editor normal map plug in - that way you have a normal map that actually matches the structure of the image; it's the reason why that texture doesn't 'sit' well over the rock because the image shows a completely different 'type' of surface to the underlying one created with the sculpt.

The mistake he's made there is in thinking that a rock is an amorphous blob built by simply sculpting with some mushy brush tools, that's why peoples models always tend to look wrong because they not taking into consideration what they actually building, it's a rock right? Well no.. what type of rock, how big it is, where will it be used.. and so on.


Offline ratty redemption

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@ savage, understood and thanks for the link, although from what kat has been teaching us over time about rock structures, I can see what he means. still though nice to see alpha brushes in action like that, previously I've only seen in video people use them to stamp on micro size surface detail.


Offline Savage

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Agreed, I think he is just showing basics though and he doesn't have much time with youtube. I like to bake my normal and a corresponding ambient occlusion to use to develop my own diffuse so yes, I know what you mean. I find it easier to create my own diffuse because, like you said, it is hard to find exactly what you want and even then, it may not match up right so... Agreed. Sometimes I may use a texture I found but I'll try to work in my own taste with blending and whatever. It never ends up looking like it once was though. Anyways, I'm really glad to be hear, I'm sure we have a lot to learn from each other. Going to be awesome! Thanks again. I'll post more when I have time.


Offline ratty redemption

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@ savage, interesting and we're looking forward to seeing more of your work when you have time, be it models or textures :)

speaking of which I should of made that clear previously, blender is the main 3d app we use but there are also texture artists and coders who hang out here that teach us about various aspects of their games work :)



Offline ratty redemption

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kat, thanks that's an excellent html tutorial :)



Offline kat

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Polycount Wiki page on environment art, includes some tutorial links on making rocks and similar terrain objects - http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting


Offline ratty redemption

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very cool, that page looks like it has a wealth of very good tutorials, excellent find :)