Realistic Rocks

Artwork Focused Critiques
#1

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 :smiley:

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.

C&C?

Attachments

RealisticRocks.jpg799×599 54.6 KB

#2

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.

Good luck.

#3

Thank you so much for the comments and crits padfoot, very helpful! I will look into everything you suggested.

#4

Here is a link to the tut that has everything you need for your work. Hope you enjoy it!

#5

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1444035

I figured that this thread does not belong here in “Focused Critique”. New images on the new thread.