Rewriting this

Have you seen these?
http://wiki.polycount.com/Environmen...Rock_and_Stone

Good reference is also key!

Technique aside though, like any other art issue a lot of it just comes down to aesthetic vision.

Post your wip!

Yeah I have Eric, and they are great for walls and the closest one to being any help is this http://www.jmchristopher.com/portfol...kTutorial.html but it's incomplete. His technique appeals to me of booleaning squares at the start to build up some nice forms, but its a very slow procedure.

I can model rocks individually as you can go pretty crazy with them, but when they're in a cluster as above, it's hard to get deep sharp clean cracks and so forth in a sculpt. My wip from yesterday I just scrapped as it was a joke, so I'll be sure to have another crack and post it up, I just need some direction so I'm not approaching it aimlessly I guess.

Not sure if you have seen this:

http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/mod...lar_rocks.html

Parts of it may of assistance to you.

I'll definately be having a crack at this one later...

I've been creating a whole bunch of rocks as of late. I think a lot of the techniques I learned from trial and error but there are a few key brushes in Zbrush that I learned to use.
My Workflow:

-Create a base mesh in 3ds max. This base mesh should have consistent polygons across the surface. Here the goal is to match the silhouette of the rocks you're trying to create.

-Bring it into Zbrush.

-Bring out the major forms of the rock using layers for each type of brush. First I usually start by laying quick guide lines with the Dam Standard brush. My personal preference is then to use the hpolish brush holding alt with a hard square alpha to bring out the major forms. I also use hpolish without holding alt here to flatten out areas that get lumpy.

-Then work through each subdivision level sculpting with the hpolish brush. I don't use many other brushes besides hpolish and a hard square alpha. Make sure you leave a good ratio of flat areas in your rock to the more detailed areas around edges.

-Once the rock is finished export the High, then decimate and export the Low.

-lay out UV's to get get your seams like the seams on a baseball or anyway with the least seams and minimal stretching.

-Bake to get normal map and MR AO. Take the normal map into crazybump and see what kind of maps you can get for added cavity/shadows and edge highlights.

-Mix your maps together find suitable rock textures and paint/edit as needed.

This is just my workflow, there are so many ways of creating rocks. For me it really just came down to getting used to Zbrush and being patient working through each subdivision level.

Thats great help timwiese.

You wouldn't happen to have any screenies of any end products do you? Or an idea of what your 3ds max base mesh looks like (now I think about it, thats my main problem.)

Anyway thanks again! .

I don't have any of the end products as all the rocks I've done lately have been professional work I can't share.

But in about an hour I managed to create the base mesh and start sculpting to show you the potential the method I'm using has.





Now keep in mind my current scuplt is only about an 40 minutes of work, I usually spend about 8 hours (sometimes more for epic sized rocks) on the sculpt to get the desired level of detail.

This sculpt is currently at subd level 5 I would probably take it up to 7 or 8.

I'm not the fastest sculpter and I am sure some of these guys are way faster but you really need to realize that a lot of creating rocks is just about taking your time and not giving up when things look blobby.

This is why Tim is the master!

I don't have that much experience with sculpting rock formations as I've just started using ZBrush 4 days ago, but I feel I've gotten some pretty good results with just a few simple techniques.

Here's how my rock formation was on Friday after I had just started using ZBrush.



And here's how it was Saturday after I experimented with a few brush suggestions from some fellow Polycounters.





Here's a general step-by-step of how I made that.

1. Start with a cube in Max that has 8 splits along each axis in Max to import into ZBrush. I find it's better to make the base cube in Max as it will be all quads compared to ZBrush's standard cube that has triangles on 2 sides.

2. Once you have your cube in ZBrush, start smoothing and pulling out using the Standard Brush and Clay or Clay Buildup while adding subdivision levels when you need more to manipulate.

3. Once you get a good basic form for the shape of the rock start adding and subtracting medium shapes/formations using Mallet Fast.

4. Go over the rock using Polish to flatten out areas and give the rock more hard edges.

5. Using the standard brush with Drag Rectangle and an alpha derived from a cliff/rock wall from CGtextures give the rock some light detailing.

Wow Tim, thats a great help, particularly the amount of time you say you can spend doing it, i'm obviously just giving up too easily which is pretty sad. Am I correct in saying you just bloated out bits of your base mesh and polished it? I'm still grasping the basics of zbrush, but I'll definitely have a try today.

I've been doing a lot of this here at work, and generally start with a VERY loose proxy model, sometimes duplicating it out as subtools in ZBrush and rotating them and scaling them into position to get a larger formation. If so I then use "ReMesh All" to get a unified skin that retains the chunkyness of the individual shapes ready for sculpting. So far I am amazed at how free and easy it is to create great, natural-looking rock formations with just two brushes: TrimDynamic, with a generic rough blob or something as alpha to create and build up planes and angles (the alpha is just in there to add a tiny bit of roughness and happy accidents, you really want to go for big surfaces first), and Flakes, with a similar alpha to build up rough formations and details. I'm sorry I can't share any of the results yet, but I think if you experiment with these two things will become apparent after a while. Fast, fun and powerful as hell. Then crunch the high with Decimation Master, export it, and continue crunching to get the low, UV it with UV Master, and you're pretty much ready to bake.

Lot of people asked me on how to do a sculpting tutorial of the tiling tutorial I did for this: http://wiki.polycount.com/TilingRock...llrender01.jpg

I will do my best to describe it soon! It's not difficult, it's just a bit tricky.

Wow bugo that would be perfect!!!

rasmus - wow I didn't think of using remesh all and just plonking cubes or whatever to make the basic shape, thats a great idea!! Thanks for the tips I'll be sure to give them a shot. Really appreciate it.

Everyone's been a great help, thank you.

i like the timeing on this was starting to get ready to do my first organic scene in udk of one of my faviourt fishing spots and and bugo's rock wall is close to the shape im trying to hit.

lets just keep on his back for a rock sculpting tute :P

Aaah I haven't seen those old rocks screenshots in a while!
one tip sums them all: mudbox flatten tool with 'update plane' unchecked

Considering the amount of time: once you got used to the process (half a dozen boulders should do !) each of those (the meshes in the first image of the thread) can be sculpted-retopo-uv-textured in about 4-6 hours.
There's been tremendous work in recent years with automatic retopology and polygon reducing technique, so it should be even faster. But remember that sculpting will always take a least a few hours, so keep trying ;)

so bugo is that little tutorial going to happen.

I like Jacob Christopher's technique, but I wouldn't spend the time cleaning up a boolean operation. Just bring your whole rock formation into ZBRush, do a polygroup split, then remesh the whole thing. It takes about ten seconds, and you're ready to dive in with the hPolish and fast mallet brushes for surface treatment. You can use the clip brush to knock off the bottom.

Originally Posted by dustinbrown

I like Jacob Christopher's technique, but I wouldn't spend the time cleaning up a boolean operation. Just bring your whole rock formation into ZBRush, do a polygroup split, then remesh the whole thing. It takes about ten seconds, and you're ready to dive in with the hPolish and fast mallet brushes for surface treatment. You can use the clip brush to knock off the bottom.

im a fucking idiot for not doing that was spending forever in maya trying to clean up after the boolean.

No worries man. Now you know

Welp, that was awesome dustinbrown.
I will be trying that today during the lunch break ;D

I just got home and gave it a try. This is after some 45 minutes of sculpting and 15 minutes of doing the decimation, baking the textures (normal and ambient occlusion at 1024x) and then getting some basic diffuse on top of it.



(viewport screenshot)

I know I rushed it and I didn't even make the small spaces between the rocks, so it looks like some rocks melted together. Stupid job taking too much of my free time. But I will have a bit more time next week, so hopefully I can keep practicing rocks (without spending the time doing the bakes.. just sculpting) and do something alright in about a week from now!.

Not bad at all for a quick and dirty job! Get some dirt in the crevasses and perhaps a little moss on the bottom so it blends in with any grass you put around the rocks. Nice work dude!

Thanks dustin!. I don't think I will be using this actual model for anything, but I will remember to place in moss and whatnot to make it blend on my environments!.
One thing I don't like though, is that all the small details aren't really showing up because the diffuse is too noisy.
I think I'll try next one of those black rocks like this one:



Or the ones that are set in diagonal. Which makes me wonder, how it comes a rock that gets hit by waves from everywhere has such nice layered properties? I guess it's all because of the rock and the erosion from the waves don't affect it like other stones that seem to have lots of small holes?..

Originally Posted by passerby

so bugo is that little tutorial going to happen.

I have been crunching, can't get time to do for now. I will someday. Sorry guys