Rocks P1 Mesh Construction.

Right well I did have a look at rocks a few days ago but that was just before the presentation and I thought it would take a long time. I did some scouting around and found quite a quick and easy tutorial of rock producing albeit high poly but I thought I could use that and then use render to texture to get the normals from it, then can overlay my own textures which Ill get from Bradgate Park.

The tutorial was from a guy named Sasha Henrich http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.co.uk/ under the heading of Procedural rock creation.

I also found a few other similar tutorials on youtube doing this same work flow, so I will just do a quick test now to see how easy it is to do.

SO;
Create a box with a few segments,

Add a spherify modifier..

Add a turbosmooth modifier with a few iterations..


Next making a couple of displacement maps, the first using the 'cellular' built in texture, dragged to the material editor..

and doing a similar thing but with the built in 'noise' texture.

A couple of Noise modifiers to adjust how rough the surface is


Then a FFD 2x2x2 modifier to adjust the shape.


It really is that quick and easy to do and with this technique it would be quite easy to churn out a few rock models for my level. Now I do need reference for stone textures.. In a few days ill be going to Bradgate Park to get a few more snaps of these as well as more textures for my terrain so Ill leave it at this for the moment.
There will be a time where Ill use Mudbox which I have never used before to create seamless textures, I bought the education suite in the first year and its never been used. Having a quick look through Sasha's tutorial it seems fairly easy to use and im kicking myself for have never used it before.. Oh well!
Seems straight forward enough and I should be able to get some decent models produced - what I have done so far is pretty high poly stuff but then I would be making a lower poly mesh of my high poly and render-to-texture a few maps projecting onto the low poly. Im quite looking forward to this but without suitable textures it would be a bit pointless to continue until im at that stage.