Working with Modular Rocks by Philipk

The Modeling Process

In this example I started out with just a simple subdivided plane and slapped on the texture.



If you want to create more variation, using the same tiling texture for all variations can work well, especially if you offset/flip/rotate the UV or model to really use the most of the texture.



Just like when the texture was made I start cutting out all strong cracks I want to, in 3DS Max I usually just use the cut tool and connect new edges where I need them. I also made an instance on each side of the same mesh just to have some idea of the tiling already at this point.

It can be a good ide to try and keep the mesh triangle density as even as you can. But I tend to "square" the mesh up as I go on with it, so it is no big deal if it is looking very unevenly distributed at first, it is just a matter of creating new edge loops and connect others.



I tend to extrude edges where strong cracks are early on. After this step I just use one single smoothing group for the whole thing (or in Maya: only smooth edges).



Then I try to keep the cracks as splits for my smoothing. So there will only be hard edges where the cracks are. This is to get away from a too soft look but not having only hard edges.



To have your edges still sharp, yet not in different smoothing groups I chamfer the edges, sometimes you may want even sharper edges and may then need to add a support edge on each side of the wanted hard edge.

This of course raise the triangle and vertex count so you need to keep optimizing this as soon as you chamfer an edge you can go in and collapse a lot of edges close to each other with no or minimal change in the smoothing. As you can see in this picture I can easily optimize the vertex count where the blue areas are.



After these steps it is pretty much just to continue as far as you want to take it. Some tips to quickly change larger shapes is to use subtle noise modifiers in 3DS Max on selected edges (there should definitely be a similar tool in Maya).

Also a very effective way of moving chunks of your model without distorting it totally is to use smooth selection in 3DS Max.
As an example I could with that just select a row of vertices/edges/faces and move in or out where the blue color is in this picture.



When you start to feel somewhat closer to being done it can be a good idea to look at how the mesh repeats itself and espcially look at the borders of your mesh.

As I said before it is pretty nice to have a couple of instances of your mesh on each side to keep track on this all the time.
If you want your set of rocks or other similar type of objects to be really usable ingame you will need to "cap" the borders.
In this example I just selected all border edges and extruded them and then pulled them back to create a kind of "box shape" of my whole mesh.