Been a little while since my last update and in that time I've gotten a fair bit done, so what I'm going to do is split my progress into a few different blog posts so that they don't get too long. :) As the title suggests, I'm gonna start off with a family of rocks that I made.
I started off sculpting one of them in ZBrush which was quite an easy process. Rocks aren't that complex in shape so it didn't take long at all. Here's a picture:
He's just happy to be here really!
Up to this point all was going well! I got him textured to a standard I was happy with, got his normals sorted out and all that jazz - all I had to do was put him into Maya and bake the high poly onto a low poly version. This is where I started to get a few problems. :(
Since I had sculpted the whole thing in ZBrush, the polycount was preeeetty high. Ridiculously high. I don't want to talk about it levels of high. So when it came to trying to reduce those polys it was a bit of a pain. I had done this with a tree and had no issues at all with it, so I assumed it was going to be the same simple process. Oh how wrong I was!
The rest of his body was fine but because I had sculpted his face into the model it was causing a few issues. Lowing his polys would work to a certain point and then just mess up completely, and in turn refused to bake onto a lower poly version. :(
So with a heavy heart (and some useful advice from Jim) I decided it was time to just go back to the basics and make him in Maya instead. Here's the result of that:
He's a little more blocky than the ZBrush version but overall I think he came out pretty well. I also cheated a little and used the UV map from the original, then applied it to the new model and painted over that to save some time. Here's his UVs so you can get a look at the painting:
With the first rock done it was time to make his family! This was a much faster process when done just in Maya, so thank you Jim for making me see sense! Here they are all together having a good time:
I wanted them to be a range of different shapes so that they're easily distinguished from all angles. My plan is to use them in my upcoming scene and have them having a picnic or something. I was originally going to separate them across the environment, but I can't quite get myself to split them up now!
The whole family are up on Sketchfab, so if you'd like to get a closer look at them you can do so by clicking this link!
Finally, here are their UV maps too - just for continuity. ;)
That's all I'm going to write about these rocks for now. I'll post more about them when it comes to putting them into a scene. :)
Thank you so much for reading and have a lovely day!
