I’m beginning work on a scene that is made up of a bunch of rock formations. I’m planning on sculpting the details and then baking normal maps from that to enhance the detail of the rocks, but I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on how to best go about this. I’ve done tests of this sort of thing in the past, and haven’t been satisfied, mainly because the normal map wouldn’t hold up when the player got close (since the rocks are very large), and any of the detail in the texture wasn’t reflected in the normal map–spots that look like they should be bumpy aren’t etc. Any advice on how to make realistic looking rock formations would be appreciated.
(sorry if this is in the wrong section, I wasn’t sure exactly where to put this)
Not a pro at high-level art assets in games so take this with a grain of salt, but have you looked into LOD (Level of Detail) variants for your rock formations? As the player gets closer, low poly (with normals baked) meshes could be transformed into higher poly versions.
Again I’m not really sure what sort of scene you’re making, but this should allow you to get the detail you are looking for.
There are plenty ways to go with rocks, it depends how much performance do you want to spend with them and how much time do you want to spend making them. You can sculpt every rock by itself and then on top of them you use 1 detail map which will make closeup details. Or you can really make only 1 or two rocks with higher texture size (1 or 2k) and just place this rock in different positions so that it doesnt look it has been repeated too much. With rocks to achieve best results is to always bake normal map, ambient occlussion and cavity map from your sculpt model, becouse only that way your holes and sharp edges will follow color balance of rock itself. Since you said your color doesnt fit normal map i am guessing you are painting color texture from source photos, which could be good, but always overlay ambient occlussion and cavity on top of it and the best would be not to use full opacity of photo texture, becouse then contrasts are too big. For example take a look at Big environmental pack on Asset store, color textures of rocks are simply following normal map and AO map.
For me personally this guy is the best, and if you want to learn how to make awesome nature scenes he is who you should learn from.
This scene is using only few rock meshes and it looks really good.
Also check out his rock modeling techniques in his channel you got all explained there. You can skip that 3d coat voxel modeling part, since with sculptris you can achieve similar stuff.
Dang, that video looks really nice. I’ll have to check out that guy’s channel.
I’m planning on doing as much as I can in sculptris, and then I’ll bring it in to Blender to bake normals/AO and make some LOD levels for everything. I’m gonna try to put as much detail as I can into the rocks, but we’ll see how that affects performance since there’s going to be a lot of them.
