Procedural Workflow

As a student, I find it important to learn as much about certain software solutions as I can now that I still have all the time to do so. I know that using scans weren’t going to grand me that knowledge. I also find that I have a lot more freedom when making procedural materials and with sculpting the rocks. For example, I could regulate how much stones I wanted my material to have, how many leaves, the size of them etc. in Substance Designer. I miss that freedom with scanned assets and materials. However, now that Quixel Mixer exists it gives a lot more freedom with scanned materials.

I used scanned images for the leaves and grass blades though. I could’ve made them myself in ZBrush or in Substance Designer for example. But the scanned images give a much nicer result and it wasn’t worth the time in my opinion.

Rock Production

Before this project, I never really sculpted any rocks. I always made them in 3ds Max with certain modifiers. But I knew that wouldn’t do the trick with this environment, and besides, as I stated before, I really wanted to learn more about ZBrush. So, I searched a couple of tutorials and articles on how other people go about sculpting and creating rocks. I noticed that a lot of people used similar techniques. With that in mind, I gathered some reference of the rocks and started sculpting blockouts, (the ones I used in my blockout scene). A friend of mine told me that it’s important to get the silhouette right of the rocks. So, I mainly focused on getting the large shapes to look right. It also had to look right on all sides, so I could copy the rock around and get an entirely ‘new’ rock from just rotating it a bit. In the end, I made: 2 large rocks, (these rocks cover 60% of the whole scene,) 3 medium-sized rocks and 3 small rocks, (these 6 where mainly used down the path).

Another thing to keep in mind is the scale. The big rocks have way more curves, details and faces than the small pebbles. I just kept in mind how they would look in the result while sculpting. And this is also why having a good blockout is important: to get a good feel of the scale you’re aiming for.