One of the most common models that you will have to model if you are doing architectural visualizations, and especially if you are doing assets for environments for the gaming industry is creating a model of a detailed rock or cliff formation. Well once you get to that point you will quickly come to a realization that even though at first glance it looks and sounds really simple, in reality rocks can provide a bit of a challenge and especially if you have never done it before. Well in today’s post i decided to tackle this issue and show you how you can create a fairly detailed rock in ZBrush, then make a low poly model of that and bake out normal maps and AO maps that you can use as a mask. To make it easier to follow i divided this into two videos so it’s easier to understand.

In the first video we will start with a little intro and a general overview of what kinds of a rocks we can see after which we will jump straight in ZBrush. We will use Dynamesh to get the general form, and then from there we will work with the Trim selection, the Trim Dynamic brushes as well as the Trim Smooth edges brush. After this we will take a look at the noise maker option for adding general noise on your model and we will finish up the fist stage of the rock. So if this sounds interesting check out the first part of the video.

In the second video we will continue from the same place where we left off in the fist one, and the very first thing we will do is get out of Dynamesh and Remesh our rock. This is where the “Holy Trinity” rule of Duplicate/Divide/Project will come into play in order to help us get all the details from the Dynamesh model onto the new ZRemeshed model. After all this we will also see how we can use some custom brushes to add in some details on the rock and finish it up. Then in the end we will use UV Master plugin for a quick UV unwrap and we will use Substance Painter to do a quick bake of the maps. But enough with the explanation, go ahead and check out the video for yourself.

After watching those two videos you should have a better understanding of what it takes to create a Rock asset that you can use in your Visualization projects as well as use it as a game asset. To be perfectly honest i wanted to make this video first so i have a base on which i can reference for a future video that i want to make that will cover many of the things covered here but create something more “cool”. But for now this will be all, and like always if you enjoyed the videos and you learned something new then share the post around so it can reach more people.