WIP - Island Shrine Environment

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

[CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FINAL RESULT!] (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1542217&postcount=74)


I've been wanting to do a nocturnal scene for the longest time, and I've spent a long time doing gritty sci-fi stuff so I'm excited for this one.
I had an idea about doing an ancient shrine atop an island in the middle of the ocean, so I went to town.

Here is a quickie dirty sketch of what I was envisioning.

http://i.imgur.com/UvHCc.jpg

Im playing around with the idea of rock slabs encasing the shrine like a crown atop the mountain. When I made the sketch I wasn't clear on what I wanted to display in the middle of it, but I started working on an idea I had recently. More on that in later posts.

In the meantime, I started messing with the overall shape of the island within UDK, so this is the shape I settled on, along with a few basic meshes that I speed-modeled just to block things in. You can even see a small preview of what I want to see in the middle.

http://i.imgur.com/vWpDa.jpg

Right now I'm adding rock meshes all over just to break the terrain textures a bit. I'll have more progress shots when I'm done placing those.

As an inspiration for overall shape, texturing and foliage I've been looking at these and similar:

http://i.imgur.com/7xVE8.jpg

I know it's in a pretty early state, but any observations or critiques of what I have so far are more than welcome :poly108:


[CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FINAL RESULT!] (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1542217&postcount=74)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Added some rocks, messed around with the textures a little bit and got rid of that silly glowy water material for the ocean.
However, I've stumbled unto a bit of a problem. See those black spots? I used the foliage mode to randomly add rocks on the mountain, and as soon as I built the scene, all the rocks placed with foliage mysteriously lost their texture.

http://i.imgur.com/EHIYL.jpg

I don't know if it's a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, I've spent hours trying to resolve this and the Google gods have failed me. I really don't want to have to place all those by hand :poly122:

Anyone have any idea what could be wrong?

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

SUCCESS! I solved the lightmass-allergic foliage rock problem! Further snooping around UDN made me find the culprit and fix the "nega-rocks". According to UDN:

Each individual mesh instance has its own shadow and/or light map generated by Lightmass, and these are tiled together for each precomputed batch batch can support precomputed. There are several settings on the StaticMesh that should be checked for precomputed lighting to operate well with instanced foliage. Lightmass is less forgiving when generating shadow maps for instanced meshes, and incorrect settings could lead to black meshes after rebuilding lighting.

-Light Map Coordinate Index - must be set to a valid UV channel that has a unique UV unwrapping. The Static Mesh Editor's "Generate Unique UVs" feature can quickly generate a unique unwrapping.

-Lightmap Resolution - this must be a small enough number so that all the shadow map for instances in a single cluster (by default 100) can be tiled together without exceeding the maximum texture resolution (4094x4096).

I went into the mesh properties and it turns out the "lightmass coordinate reading"was set to read from UV channel 1, and my UV's were in channel 0. I put the 0 in, press build and voila! The anti-rocks from the Negaverse are replaced with real tangible rocks!

http://i.imgur.com/5jrMb.jpg

Now, on to grass and foliage!

[Adam L. Gray]

Looking good so far. The rocks look like they could use a bit more depth though.

In fact, this might be a good opportunity to look into tessellation, not sure if it requires a dx11 card though :)

Cheers

[Paunescu.Daniel]

i can't clearly see from the images you posted but, have you added some kind of waves where the water intersects the rocks or the shore? or is it just lowered opacity? If you did add some sort of foam or stuff like that, could you please share the idea? Thank you!!

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Oh hey! Funny you should ask I was gonna post about this later on. I don't have a lot of experience building complex materials in the editor, so I searched for "Ocean material" tutorials and came across THIS DUDE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zggG0wCD7yw).
The material looks AMAZING. And on top of that, he graciously put a download link for it, saving me hours of trial and error building a gnarly node spiderweb in the material editor.
I can build materials to some extent, but the way he did the froth surrounding all meshes and the waves and the transparency is just top-notch. I have no idea if he posts here or if this fantastic material has been featured here before, but if anyone knows him tell him he rocks.

I still may have to tweak it a little bit, mine is far from what you see in the video.

Tiros: Thanks for the advice, the rocks are sharing the same material as the side of the mountain, do you recommend they have an individual material with more detail? I mean the rocks aren't going to be that prominent and they're gonna be surrounded by foliage.

[Adam L. Gray]

Ah, sorry. Didn't make myself completely clear there. What I meant was to add depth to the actual material. So that'd go for both the mountain bit and the actual rocks :)

While we're at it though, the rocks you have there in the scene are pretty spherical or blob-like, I know they can be quite a pain to create, so at least consider having a go at this one, by our dear Sacha here: http://www.saschahenrichs.com/

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

:poly108: Whoa! Thank you for leading me to Sascha. I am definitely trying out his method, it looks like it's exactly what I need!

[Paunescu.Daniel]

thanks for your reply, i saw the vid with the ocean but i didn't saw the download link

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Oh wow sorry, didn't notice your comment. Here you go:

Ocean Material Download Page (http://www.johnheeter.com/advanced-udk-ocean-tutorial/)

[Piesandbombs]

These seems to be coming along very nicely so far. The scene's design and subject alone is very neat.

I'm hoping to see some very nice foliage around the bases of the stone, and around the whole place. I'd be interested in seeing your workflow on that.

Might I suggest adding some dirt mounds around the bases of the stones, or something of the sort?

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Whew! I'm back. I swear job hunting has got to be the biggest time sink...

Anyway some changes since last time. I discarded the old mountain in favor of a new one with two waterfall ridges on each side. Also re-made the big rocks, you can see them strewn throughout to break up the plainness of the terrain. They're all the same rock mesh:

http://i.imgur.com/0Vlqi.jpg

The main reason I did this was to add more variety to the terrain and also I felt the environment didn't have enough interesting props, and I wanted to integrate these:

http://i.imgur.com/daBlr.jpg

They're still in a very early stage but I'm liking how they look on the side of the mountain.

As for the mysterious structure I wanted to do on the top, here is a block-in of what I had in mind. This is very likely to change, but it's a start:

http://i.imgur.com/OfKzg.jpg

Next on the list is re-doing the smaller rocks as per Adam's advice, and of course, starting on some grass and medium-sized plants.

Until next update!

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Back! Messing with the grass now:

http://i.imgur.com/Gfqbt.jpg

Here is a closer look at the clumps of grass. I still think they look a bit rough... Any suggestions?

http://i.imgur.com/0EbNO.jpg

[chrisradsby]

Looks pretty sweet, very "fantasy"-like, kinda reminds me of Black & White-stuff, usually have that annoying hermit that you can't kill on top of that stuff xD

The main thing to do right now would be to make sure it looks really cool and good from several angles. Pick some and make sure it looks good and interesting. Maybe mix the rocks up, right now you got regular stones just put in, when you should have cliff-type ones in there as well.

Good work so far though! :)

[Shade117 pro]

This is turning out awesome man, I really loved the concept. You've done a great job! And the addition of the waterfall + bridge is perfect and matches so well!

[Jessica Dinh]

Ooo, I really like your foliage, it blends well with the terrain!

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Ferns! Flowers! Vines! Generic tropical plants! Oh my!

http://i.imgur.com/HLFcp.jpg

Another view of more plant life:

http://i.imgur.com/4ipap.jpg

So the whole thing looks like this now:

http://i.imgur.com/bKNc8.jpg

Next up: TREES, OMG :poly142:

[MrNinjutsu]

This is coming along real nice. Keep up the great work!

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Thanks man!
Skyrim is ruining the hell out of my self-imposed deadlines.
I haven't touched it in 2 days though and I'm about to snap.

[Alberto Rdrgz]

this keeps looking better and better.

[toxic_h2o]

this has come along way, I cant wait to see more progress!!

[KartoonHead]

The difference between the first draft and what you have now is mindblowing! The latest addition of foliage really took it to another level.

[Joopson]

I'm Really really digging this right now.
Keep going. It's lovely.

[SasoDuck]

One things that's sort of bugging me (besides how freaking amazing this model is) is the size of the rocks on the hill. There's some really big ones farther up that would look better if they were closer to the bottom; they just don't look like they'd be stable simply embedded in that sort of sandy rock...

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Aaaah I see what you mean. That makes this island a deadly rock slide hazard.
I'll definitely tone down the size of the upper boulders. Thanks for pointing it out!

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Skyrim has released me long enough to post this, so here we go. Some hot tree action.

http://i.imgur.com/NQ1qS.jpg

A closer look:

http://i.imgur.com/azhrk.jpg

Next up I'm tackling that bridge.

[SirCalalot]

This is looking thoroughly impressive Kaiser!

Did you model the trees yourself or using SpeedTree? Either way, I'm interested in how you got that wonderful moss effect on the roots. Are they Vertex-Painted or built into the Texture Atlas?

One thing I'd like to see is a bit more variation and foam in the waterfalls, as they are pretty invisible at the moment.
I love water effects, me. :D

[Cheese_Shinobi]

Really coming together nicely! Show us some textures plz :)

[Oranghe]

Like! gogogo :D

[SasoDuck]

Nice trees. Are you going to put any near the bottom?

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Thanks everyone! No Speedtree up in here. All foliage was made from scratch. As for the moss, it was added right into the texture. I haven't jumped into vertex painting yet, I'm hoping to experiment with it later on especially with those monoliths on top.

Here's a sample of the tree bark texture:
http://i.imgur.com/21BHq.jpg

The tree has a ton of long winding roots so most of the UV space is occupied by the mossy root parts as you can see. One of the reasons why I didn't use a tree generator, I wanted a very particular tree with roots tearing and winding all over the terrain.

Here's the tree mesh in UDK:

http://i.imgur.com/nQPKe.jpg

The leaves and the rest of the plants are pretty standard foliage stuff with alphas, and everything else is just rocks and terrain so far. I'll post more textures when I get more exciting meshes in there. I have a lot of rock carving ahead of me :poly122:

As for the water, I'm using UDK's stock running water, I don't have the know-how to make my own water shader (yet), but I have used a little Cascade to do smoke before so I'm planning on adding a little foam and mist where the waterfall meets the ocean.

Oh and SasoChicken: I intend for the foliage to get thicker as you go higher up the mountain. But don't worry, I have other non-foliage meshes to add around the bottom.

[synergy11]

Nice work.

Can you show more close ups and wires of your tree and your foliage plants?

Thanks a lot!

Cheers

[SasoDuck]

Since you didn't use Speedtree, how'd you make the trunk and roots? Splines?

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

As requested, tree wires and assorted plants:

http://i.imgur.com/S29FQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/OktWr.jpg



My process for making the trees? Z-spheres!

http://i.imgur.com/rX41g.jpg

1- Made a Z-sphere skeleton
2- Made an adaptive skin out of the skeleton
3- Sculpt that skin
4- Export the lowest subdivision level into Max, unwrap the shit out of it
5- Threw the low poly from Max and the high poly from ZBrush into X-normal
6- ??????
7- INDUSTRY JOB

...(Ok maybe not yet)

I still haven't gotten the most out of the X-normal settings so I got a bit of artifacts and other little weird shit happening in the bakes which I had to fix in Photoshop, but overall it all worked out.

[SirCalalot]

My word that tree and foliage is impressive 0_o

Your texture work is beautiful!
Cheeky question: what's your texturing pipeline like? As it's very effective :)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Thanks Calalot,
For these photo-realistic textures there's just a lot of research involved. I spent some time looking for real-life environments similar to what I wanna do, look at the type of terrain and foliage that tend to grow there, and then hunt for reference images.

For simple, tiny things like grass and flowers I just Crazybump it and call it a day. For more complex things like the tree and the huge rocks, after I do the high poly sculpt, I slap on the AO and normal bakes on the plain white low-poly mesh to see how those cavities are gonna look, then when I'm happy with the results I start the texture image hunt.

A lot of the time... scratch that. ALL of the time the images you get will not match the color or shape of what I want, so editing those images is a big part of the process. There's always some color alteration or unnecessary shine that needs to be removed, especially for the plants. Not to mention a wear and tear pass where it applies. I had to reconstruct a lot of those branches and remove wilted leaves and that super waxy gloss many tropical plants tend to have.

When I'm done with the diffuse map, save a copy and use it as a base for the spec map, and when that's done I try out all those maps inside UDK. If everything looks good, SHIP IT. Otherwise, I try to fix things from within UDK's material editor if it's possible. If not, then back into Photoshop.

I don't think I'm doing anything out of the ordinary but I hope it shines some light on what you want to know. And if anyone has an alternate, more effective way to do things, be my guest and spill the beans.

[Jessica Dinh]

Thanks for sharing those breakdowns, that is really helpful for me since I will be making some bush stuff soon for my environment :] That tree is really beautiful, I really love how the foliage looks on it!

[SirCalalot]

Thanks Kaiser :)
It does help a lot to know the processes others use - I hadn't even thought of checking out the Ambient Occlusion and Normal Bakes on the plain white low-poly mesh before proceeding. I usually sort out the AO last thing and only compile in the Normal bake when the diffuse is set.
The method you use should help me to get more accurate results (I am dreadful at UV Unwrapping).

Edit: Have you made your trees and foliage animated?

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Hey don't worry, I used the same method as you (leaving the normal and AO test for last) until an art director put me in my place :poly144:

As for the animated foliage, I know it will make a huge difference especially when I make a video of the finished product, sadly right now I lack the technical know-how to make the foliage sway with the wind. On the upside, living with a level designer versed in UDK has its perks, as he's already supplied me with a couple of tutorials for animating foliage textures according to a pre-set wind speed. I definitely will take a crack at it but right now it is the last "to do" on my checklist.
ARGH I wanna start working on the shrine at the top already! :snarl:

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

FINALLY my favorite part of this whole thing. Sculpting some props. This piece is the pillar where the hanging bridge is tied up.

http://i.imgur.com/4MJ2c.jpg

I think I'm at a stopping point, but if you see any improvements or fixes that can be made, please yell at me.

[Snader]

While you've pushed the canopy planes pretty far for what they are, I'm gonna suggest adding some more polygons to the them because they're not looking too great.

Considering that a single ivy plant has more leaf-planes than your entire tree, something has gone wrong with poly-distribution.

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Do you mean adding more polys to the planes themselves or adding more planes to the entire tree canopy?

[Impala88]

what's the lightmap resolution on those trees? i always struggle getting the lightmaps to a suitably low res when making trees with enough polys to appear believable. Ends up being mega high like 256 or 512 and then my lightmass build goes through the roof.

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Well I haven't fiddled with the lightmaps yet, so I believe they're at their default (32). I'll try to fix what Snader said and after that I'll start experimenting with the lightmap.

[Snader]

More planes. I think you could probably optimize the ones you have right now too. For starters they're very square and I'm guessing you could move in the corner verts to round out and get rid of empty texturespace and overdraw.

Come to think of it, you could do that with all your foliage planes. They're all extremely straight right now.

Plus, you could weld the vertices on the tips of all grass leaves and some of the other leaves to save a few polies too. Like this for example (left one):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/448525/keep/Polycount/simple%20plant.png

[SirCalalot]

FINALLY my favorite part of this whole thing. Sculpting some props. This piece is the pillar where the hanging bridge is tied up.

http://i.imgur.com/4MJ2c.jpg

I think I'm at a stopping point, but if you see any improvements or fixes that can be made, please yell at me.
Did I mention this looks spafftastic?
Very nicely made :)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Christmas break = OVER :whyme:

After escaping that productive time killing chaos vortex that is a visit to the parents during Christmas, I finally awakened from a self inflicted eggnog & vodka-fueled haze and finished texturing the bridge. So here it is, in its natural habitat inside UDK.

Now I still gotta revisit those trees and then AWWWW YEAH it's shrine-on-top-of-mountain time!

http://i.imgur.com/biA1u.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/9aLC6.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/SfYyw.jpg

More soon. Still feeling a little groggy/jetlagged.

[chrisradsby]

Hmm, I think the bridge looks better in the viewport. I guess it's the lighting overall giving it that bluish look. Are you dead-set on having it nighttime? Good work so far though, it has been nice to see the progress on this :)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Thank you! I'd really like to keep it as a nocturnal environment, but what you see now has 0% work where lighting is concerned, that's the default nighttime UDK lighting setup which yeah, looks a little flat and way too bright for a night scene.
I'm planning on adding other sources of light through torches, so I'm hoping that wards off that flat bluish moonlight.

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Progress at last!

Love how the standing stones on top of the shrine are turning out:

http://i.imgur.com/PAE8M.jpg

I'm still debating whether to make the rune carvings on the standing stones glow faintly, or will it be too much, considering I already have plans for a flashy centerpiece, as you can see in the center.

For now my personal opinion is "yep, too much, move the hell on".

[Leodido]

love your work, very inspiring stuff :)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Oh wow thanks! :poly136:
It's been a challenge to tackle this monster by myself while at the same time looking for another job, it's incredibly motivating to know someone out there appreciates this. It's re-energizing, even.

[Zyloh]

I love the progression through these screenshots. Excited to see the final product!

[mutatedjellyfish]

Progress at last!

Love how the standing stones on top of the shrine are turning out:

http://i.imgur.com/PAE8M.jpg

I'm still debating whether to make the rune carvings on the standing stones glow faintly, or will it be too much, considering I already have plans for a flashy centerpiece, as you can see in the center.

For now my personal opinion is "yep, too much, move the hell on".

I would try out a subtle orange glow in the carvings on the stones. It would be a nice compliments to the blues and greens.

[Iciban]

amazing! like before, really inspiring.
Love how you show everything step by step. Can't wait when this level is finish.
Btw, how many hrs/ days would u say u spend on this

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

I would try out a subtle orange glow in the carvings on the stones. It would be a nice compliments to the blues and greens.

ACE! Will definitely try this. :thumbup:


Btw, how many hrs/ days would u say u spend on this
Wow. It's become a little hard to determine by now. I've had a LOT of interruptions along the way. Job interviews, art tests, trips outside the country, Christmas break, etc. If I were to lump together an approximate of how long it's taken me to get to this spot, I'd say about a month (if I were to work weekdays, full time and uninterrupted).

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

OK mutatedjellyfish, I gave your suggestion a try and... I love the results! I am definitely going forward with this. Here's a quick & dirty .gif of how the runes look in-game:

http://i41.tinypic.com/nnpens.gif

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Center dais is done! :poly108:

http://i.imgur.com/rKx6x.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/k0R4G.jpg

Now on to the pedestal in the center. Getting closer!

[shawnell3d]

im starting to like this.....

[Orangeknight]

im starting to like this.....

I'm starting to love this!

[choco]

Looking really good and very promising. I'd suggest to play around with the tint of the glowing crevices, maybe going for some glowing blue and save the red tint for some torches to put a along the path to balance the colors.
You might also need to darken the whole scene, you can achieve that by lowering the tone mapping values or turning down the environement lighting values.

Using some fuzzy shading in the material editor could also add some rim lighting to your models and help with the atmosphere.

Keep up the good work :)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

All valid points choco, I think I'll keep the crevices that way for now since the center piece will be a strong source of blue light along with the moonlight, but that could change any time since I haven't started dealing with lighting. Once all the meshes and textures are done I'll definitely follow your suggestions, especially the rim lighting one. Thanks dude!

[synergy11]

Nice job.

Can you break down how you did the large center ground rock piece. The one surrounding the hole.

Thanks!

[artquest]

I love the animated runes! looks sick man!

[dpaynter26]

First off, Peanut Butter.....Chunky to be exact,

Secondly, on to your foliage......AMAZING! LOVE IT! This enviro is looking great and turning out to be quite good inspiration, congrats :)

[dudealan2001]

love the gif you got it's really coming to life.

[SamboMambo]

what are your plans for the lighting? its already pretty badass, but some sexy lighting will take it to the next level.

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Nice job.

Can you break down how you did the large center ground rock piece. The one surrounding the hole.

Thanks!

With pleasure.

I took a great deal of inspiration for the center piece (and many of the rocks) from Orb's work in Crasher (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83186). (If you haven't checked out that thread, DO SO, it's full of concentrated awesome).
Specifically, I looked at this piece he did:

http://orbart.free.fr/Gallery/Images/plateforme.jpg
http://orbart.free.fr/Gallery/Images/plateforme2.jpg



So I split the circular dais in 1/4, got that into Zbrush and went to town on it:

http://i.imgur.com/jsfi9.jpg
I used a couple of brushes from Orb himself, which he graciously released with a tutorial on his portfolio.

Then I took the 1/4 chunk for the lowpoly, unwrapped it and threw that into xNormal along with the high poly and got the normals & AO, which led to this:

http://i.imgur.com/U88ke.jpg

Then after that it's just throw it into UDK, check that it looks sexay, and that's about it.

Hope that helps!

[synergy11]

Thanks!

Did you use mostly Alpha stamps to make the details?

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

No sir! It was all hand-carved. Alpha stamps are awesome and much faster, but I wanted the carvings to look very irregular and primitive so I drew all that by pulse and only used smaller stamps for cracks and gashes.

[Joshflighter]

Looking great man!

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Still truckin', people! Getting closer!

This time I completed the little pedestal fountain in the center and of course the crystal. Still need to work on the chains anchoring the crystal to the pedestal, but I'm doing some research to see if I can animate the crystal bobbing up and down while having physics affect the chains.

http://i.imgur.com/MB4Ig.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/nQUC1.jpg

After this, It's lighting, particles, some terrain tweaking, background elements and then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

[SirCalalot]

Very sexy-looking good sir :)

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Final Update!

I had to scramble to finish this before GDC, but here is how it all turned out.

http://www.cesaraltagracia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Sanctuary-1.jpg

http://www.cesaraltagracia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Sanctuary-4.jpg

http://www.cesaraltagracia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Sanctuary-3.jpg

http://www.cesaraltagracia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Sanctuary-5.jpg



I had the chance to show a little fly-through video I made of this to a few people at the Thursday gathering at Lefty's at GDC, and the feedback I got was pretty eye-opening (made much more sense than anything I was told at any of the career pavillion's booths).
So here's how it looks in motion, with said feedback applied:

Island Sanctuary 3D Environment - Take 2 - YouTube

Finally, I have to thank ALL OF YOU who submitted such great feedback through the development of this scene, you guys rock so hard, the amount of motivation you fueled into this project was massive. :)

[sybrix]

You really took this above and beyond from the first few stills you posted a while back. It was a pleasure to watch it evolve into a beautiful piece of work.

My one minor nitpick is that water on the dais area. The only visual indication that told me it was water was the lily pads floating on the top. You may want to revisit the water material, it's much too clear and dark, looking almost nonexistent.

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Ack! You're absolutely right. I used UDK's stock water, so I'm gonna see what I can do about that.

[Raitoningu]

Hi Kaiser, I'm planning on making some rocks to go in an environment for my academic studies, any tips of getting something remotely similar to the new rocks you made? Thanks in advance.

[Kaiser Dämmerung]

Hi there! For the small stones, someone posted THIS TUTORIAL (http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2010/03/3dsmax-environment-modeling-1.html) in the early pages of this thread, I used it for smaller rocks and it can come in pretty handy if you lack Zbrush or Mudbox.

For the big rocks I did use Zbrush, just made a blob with ZSpheres and messed it up with a combination of Flatten brushes and Trim Dynamic brushes, and the cracks were carved with Orb's own custom brushes (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83186). Then it was just standard procedure. Generate a low poly version, unwrap, bake Normal/AO, get some nice rock texture references, manipulate that in Photoshop until it looks like it belongs in your scene, and then test it in UDK.

Oh and don't be afraid to research the types of rocks that exist and which one better fits your scene. That will be incredibly helpful come texture time.

[Raitoningu]

Those tips will certainly come in handy with my project. Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your scene is fantastic!

[SirCalalot]

The scene looks wonderful @Kaiser.
And thanks for the tips!

[Darkleopard]

Looks so good. I want to sculpt like you