"The Rock"

I'm going to be posting here all the process to create a rock for our final Diorama.

During the modelling process I realised how ungrateful the life of a games props creator is. I mean, I was actually spending hours modelling a rock. A rock. Do you know what I mean?

And It wasn't as easy as I expected, you cannot just create a random lumpy thing and call it a rock, Its shape is actually full of little particularities and details and your mass of polygons can actually look like nothing at the end. Or a monster. It happened.

I had some existencial monologues with the rock thing. Looking for references on google images was quite funny to watch myself doing.

Like everything in my life, It started with a cube. Then I started to connect the edges to create more faces, I first used the FFD modifier and discovered the Brush tool to bend and stretch the forms. It was tricky not to end up with a sharp aspect, because a rock is something really solid and is really easy and sometimes unintentional to create thorns and spikes when you're modifying the shape!

Look at my beautiful babies

After that I used the Smoothing Groups so It wouldn't look so much like a Lego thing, It was quite an easy step because the only parts I actually had to give another smoothing value were the cavities on the rocks.

The unwrapping technique we used in these props was something totally new to me: I was introduced to the Pelt Unwrap, which I imagine we will be using quite a lot from now on, since we are starting to create more and more organic shapes, and the Pelt mode works perfectly to these kind of projects. It makes the final UVs look really funny and easy to paint on the textue, although I did have some problems to pack them after finished, because I had a lot of empty space on my bitmap file and I couldn't reorganize in a way to fix the issue. A little frustrating.

I am so annoyed with this. Maybe I can put some grass shapes and vines to make a better use of the remaining space? Some smaller assets to the final Diorama.

Next steps are texturing and adding a SketchFab model so everyone can see my beautiful rocks alive!