Sculpting Rocks

A big percentage of my level it made up of rock formations that surround the water and waterfall.

The reason i am using zBrush is it is much easier to create deformation detail to the rocks by using alphas that can be downloaded from the pixologic website. 

These are just some of the free alphas i could find to use for my sculpting detail.

One of the method i have learning when creating rocks that is it easy to get a noisy surface to create the rough and unsmooth surface a rough rock would have. This can be easily mimicked by a tool that is readily viable in all current versions on zBrush.

The tool is listed under Surface on the right side of the screen, by clicking it it will display an editor in which you can manipulate the curve and add points to create interesting variations of noised across the surface area.

Once the surface noise is done it must be applied as the preview is only a representation of the geometry could look like, this highly depends on the subdivison levels and the amount of polygons able to take on the detail.

Creating Normals, from zBrush is important to transfer the high poly detail to a lower division level.

There a multiple ways of creating a lower resolution of the higher geometry. It is possible to just simply use the lowest sub division although this doesn't give you much flexibility, another method is zRemesher a tool that will calculate current geometry and will remesh it to a low resolution using four sided polygons, this method doesn't preserve UVs so they will need to be created after, which can also be done well using UV unwrap in the tools pallet. The last way is to use decimation master which can preserve you're UVs and transform the object to almost any amount of triangles desired, the downfall of this is sometimes meshes can look very jagged and edged which with a bit of smoothing can fix.





Bibliography: http://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/alpha/