Here’s the result of my weekend project (that didn’t take all weekend to complete ;)). This is my try at making some realistic looking rocks in Blender. 100% Blender internal render, no composition nodes and no post editing.
I made the stone texture myself by photographing tree bark and then bringing it into the GIMP and adjusting color and brightness/contrast levels.
Here’s my steps on making the normal map (very easy process for making basic, bumpy, small detail normal maps in general):
Step 1: Duplicate the stone object.
Step 2: Subdivide 2 times (or how ever many you want to get the detail; you can also use multires)
Step 3: Deselect all and be sure to be in vertex select mode.
Step 4: Go Spacebar>Select>Random…>Percentage:50>OK.
Step 5: Turn on Proportional Vertex Editing and set to “Random” falloff.
Step 6: Hit SKEY to scale. Your computer might freeze up if there are to many vertices so be warned. (mine froze for a few seconds, then it was ok)
Step 7: Create your normal map from this object (“Selected to Active” obviously)
I hope someone can use these steps to create an easy normal map
Haha my grass is not that great…just flat polys with twoside UV texture…grass could be better but that’s not the focus of this scene.
Hmmm. The rocks are way too shiny, and they seem to be of one uniform sphere shape, scaled in various directions. The texture looks like it is on a flat projection. It would be better to use a cube or sphere, or even better a good UV.
The rocks themselves look very regular and smooth. I would recomend using the sculpt tools to get a more realistic shape for your meshes.
Here’s a link:
Down the page, there are some very very nice rocks. I would suggest trying to draw from that style.
Also, Take a look for some nicer textures. Try CGTextures.
You also don’t need to use those blurry cloud normal maps. It always looks better to use a normal map based off of your color texture. A great tool for this is Crazybump: Crazybump.com
It’s not free, but it has a very nice download trial.
Other than that, jut keep working at it. I would wholeheartedly reccomend to not try for whole scenes just yet. Try making single objects as realistic as possible, and rendering them on a simple white background. It will help your technique much more than breezing over large scenes.
