Specialisation Project: Rock Formation
The aim of this project was to do a mini outdoor rock and planet environment, similar to the fish tanks shown in the reference.
The scene consists of 5 different types of rocks and 9 different grass and reed assets each and the ground, ideally I would have liked to have had a few additional plants to mix in, but I am quite happy with how the scene turned out.
Here are some of the reference images used for this project:
Rocks:
The rocks are all sculpted in ZBrush using dynamesh and ZRemesher to get the base shape. For each of the 5 rocks I tried to make them quite different from each other and I also tried to use a number of different methods of when sculpting them, so I wasn’t just doing the same thing for all 5 rocks.
Reeds & Grass:
The reeds and grass where also all done in ZBrush using FiberMesh, with the colour texture map being done with ZBrush polypaint FiberMesh brushes.
Layout:
The ground plane was simply sculpted using the Maya sculpting tools.
Feedback:
My teacher Heath suggested the use of Fur based grass as a way of lowering the manual placement requirements. Initially this looked promising, however I later realised that it way always pointing directly away from any surface it was on rather pointing/growing upwards like realistic grass would. I spent quite a lot of time reading up and looking for solutions on how to make this work correctly, but was unable to get a result I was happy with and after spending time making a good ground textures ultimately decided that the textures with additional manual rock, grass and reed placement looked far better in the end.
Final Look:
The final rendered scene.