This week I wanted to make a modular pack of Desert rocks that I could scatter around the environment as I needed. My tasks this week were to learn how to create a modular pack of rocks and create all of the textures needed for the rocks through photo manipulation in Substance Alchemist. First I wanted to create a few textures I'd be able to use for this and future projects. I searched online for some secondary source sand textures that I could edit in Alchemist. I found some nice textures through google that I took into alchemist, I then played around with the colour variation to find what works best. I then mixed another texture in with the original sand to give it more variance and finally topped it off with some random pebbles scattered around the texture to give it a more realistic look - Substance Alchemist Tutorial I followed.
This is what the final texture came out looking like, with parts of the texture looking very smooth and fine and other parts course and rough, with the added pebbles I personally think it looks great and will be a great asset in helping me texture my environment. After making a few more variations using the same process I had a library of textures ready to be used within my environment. Now I had to do the same for the other types of materials within my environment. I needed a red desert rock texture that would look realistic and tiled well. So that I could just create a low poly and high poly rock and use this texture without having to do too much detailing in substance painter. I found a really nice cliff edge texture that was very dark.
I took that texture and brightened it up through colour variation on Substance Alchemist and then blended some of that mixed sand over the top which I think gave it a very realistic effect as sand from the desert will be blown against these rocks all the time slowly eroding and sometimes getting caught in pockets. After making a few more variations of textures I decided to start modelling out the rock asset pack that will be used when scattering rocks around the scene in Unreal Engine 4. Here's my rock reference sheet.
This helped me get an idea of what sort of forms I needed to create. I decided to look up a tutorial to get an idea of how I would go about modelling this. I used a Rock Tutorial from 3dEx on YouTube in which they use Zbrush to manipulate and model a large boulder / rock. After watching the tutorial I was pretty confident I could get a similar result.
I took a sphere similarly to the tutorial and started distorting it into a shape using the move tool in Zbrush, I then used the trim dynamic tool to scrape into the sphere and get the desired rock look I wanted. I then used the crumple brush to create harder edges and give the rock a more realistic look. After this I unwrapped the rock and took it into substance painter where I used a rock material and gave it a sandy look. I then repeated this process a few times to create a library of rocks around my scene, this took quite a bit of time but was definitely worth the outcome in the end. I set out to create an asset pack of rocks and create a small library of textures and I have achieved that. Overall a pretty successful week. Next week I want to look more at foliage and try and get my RV fully modelled out and ready to texture.