Working with Modular Rocks
by Philipk
This tutorial will take you through some steps I use when working with more organic type of modular units.
I will go through the process I tend to use when I create something like a set of rock walls or larger ground parts.
The idea is to show how you can get the most out of using as little material as possible.
You should be able to use a similar workflow even if you want to create something more stylized or less busy than my example.
Creating the Texture First
For this example I just went with a photo to start with. It really does not matter if you go with 100% hand painted or mostly photo, the process will be the same when it comes to the modelling part.
I made the red area brighter and the blue a bit more desaturated in order to make it well tilable.
Then offset the texture, just clone over the seams.
I tried to make sure I had a good flow on horizontal and vertical cracks on the rock.
If you try to keep those cracks continue without any major interuptions you will have a much easier task when we start the modelling process.
I quickly painted some main cracks this picture had in blue.
This example will be pretty busy with cracks and such and would not work that well if you get very far from the mesh.
The repetition can be broken up by creating a few more variations, still a good way if you are to see your rocks from a far distance is to keep cracks and stuff in the texture to a minimum.
I simply painted out all the cracks and tried to vary the crack sizes as much as possible throughout the texture.
I decided to bring this one into CrazyBump to get a quick normal out of it, that is why I added a bevel to the cracks to kind of fake "light" in a photo.
And I got an OK result as a base from that.
Here are the texture flats.
Remember that I could just as well have made the texture in a sculpt program like ZBrush or Mudbox. Or even model something in a regular 3D app.
The important things for this tutorial is to have it tilable and have some pretty defined cracks where the mesh can be split up.
When I previously worked with rocks I tend to use a mix of both sculpting up a base, maybe some additional details from a program like CrazyBump and a lot of extra hand painting in Photoshop.
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