Anyone have any tutorials on creating rocks. I'm having problems with that. At first I thought it would be easy, but actually its pretty hard. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

style? technique? specs?

i also have to model some rocks at the moment. it really depends on your specs. amount of polys, but more important, the shadertypes you can use.
and even if you have good specs it doesn't mean they will look good. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] see the rocks in crysis, even if the rest of the game looks really good... [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] (looks precedural...)
http://uk.media.pc.ign.com/media/694...g_4958630.html

FFD & Noise modifier will be your friend. Usually what i do is not concern myself too much with the polycount at first, and just get the shape that I want for each rock.

Sometimes I start with a sphere, others just a box with a lot of segments, it doesn't really matter. Then I'll use FFD Box a lot to get to the shape, then noise to add a little bit of, well, noise to the shape. Make it bumpy and irregular. That usually works pretty well for me.

Also, if I have a texture already that i am going to use. Once I am satisfied with the shape and model. I'll unwrap it, put the rock texture on it, then actually use the displace modifider and take the height map from the textures (if applicable) and try to bump out some of the geometry based on the actual texture. Usually only has decent results if you have enough geometry though. Just some food for thought. Good luck.

Experiment with optimize modifiers. This is how I did it ages ago.. make your basic shape.. then tesselate, optimize, tesselate, noise, optimize, tesselate
any combination like that. You should end up with something that's angular. Rocks in games tend to be smooth and lame looking like in that crysis shot. The optimize modifier helps that

of course, this is to create your hipoly rocks, the mesh is going to be ugly as hell. It's a piece of cake of course to make the lowpoly around it.

Here is some reference.

http://www.rockclimbing.com/cgi-bin/...&Submit=Go

One thing that helps is to think about the type of rock since that will determine it's properties. You could have smooth sandstone with hardly any angles and bulbous features like boone NC, massive granite with big features like Yosemite, overhanging limestone with pockets and a bunch of features flagstaff AZ, quartzite like Devils lake.

Cracks and crevices in the rock will have black streaks running down because of the water/mud seeping out, this is also where lichen will start to form.

We did most of these for FMP using mudbox, retopo in maya and a texturing using photos ref and an AO baking

Those look great. How big are those and what size texture maps did you use?

Here are a couple of images of a tiling rock wall that I did for Sega Rally Revo. They were very specific on what they wanted here, provided photo source, etc. Before anything else, have some reference in front of you and get a good idea of exactly what kind of rock that you are going for. There's a wide variety of rock types and surfaces. What you'll see in a river in eastern Europe is a lot different from what you'll see in a desert in Arizona.

Technically, make sure that you've got enough geometry to carry the profile well. After that normal maps and AO bakes can really sell things.





In this case, the photosource had quite a bit of lighting already in it, and it wasn't worth doing an AO pass on it. It was actually a fairly easy cut by numbers job, where I just traced cut lines around the recesses, then added extra verts in the middle and pulled them out. After that, it was a CrazyBump pass if I remember correctly.

Neat rocks Brice, but custom uv space? How big is the texture, how close can you get to those before they break down?

wow. a really nice looking rockwalk... plus i really like the colors and overall style of the sega rally game. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

what i do for rockwalls, i make a tiling rockwall texture(photosourced if you want to save time..) and throw it on a subdivided plane. then i push and pull out the geometry the way that corresponds to the texture.(make sure the uv's are locked...) when i'm done with the rough work, i render the ao map and add it to the base. then i start working on the texture and refine details, cuts, put grass here and there, add extra layers for more details etc... it also helps to lightsource the texture a little with light from above. this gives the rock more volume...

I'm using Max with this project, so FFD and noise mod worked really well actually. I need to learn mudbox or zbrush to make some really good looking rocks though.

here's a picture i did a while back while working on the blizzard fanart contest, maybe it'll help.

i just created a tileable normalmap out of this and then retopologized my mesh according to the normalmal, so i had tileable rocks i could use for the environment.

ohh sweet stuff everyone

Very nice stuff, thanks for all of your help! Sometimes I wouldn't even think of things you guys have shown me, so thanks a ton. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Kinda sloppy but here's another way that can give really good results if you spend some time on it.

Tutorial

*edit

oh and here's the actual mesh and textures. Bear in mind this was a quickie..

Rockwall.zip

Very cool tutorial okkun

very cool thanks for the tut [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

hey, I downloaded those rock off turbo squid! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] Good lookin rocks.

just stubloed over this.
http://forum.cgarena.com/viewtopic.php?t=1274#8350
i think there are better ways to model a rock, but the technique is alright.

I like finding different ways of doing the same thing, then I can take what I like about all of them and do it the best way.

Can you repost the rock tutorial okkun? Please?

Hi, this is not quite a tutorial, but it may be useful. I posted it here awhile ago: A video showing the creation of a rock material in CrazyBump. Worth watching, if you haven't seen it before.

www.crazybump.com/video

Dekard, i think this is okkun's tutorial:

http://i28.tinypic.com/2d1tuuf.jpg

this is such a awesome thread. ive been waiting for something like this.