Rocks in mountain

[Gilmer]

Hello all...

 

I wanting to create a mountain with rocks. Like in this image:

 

 

But wonder, what is the best way to do?

I think in make in ZBrush, some highpoly rocks, and create a normal on the model, with a lowpoly. And "fit" in the Leadwerks terrain. Have someway easier? Because if i do so, will be good with a model "fiting" in terrain?

 

I try make with texture, but i dont like..=/

[Canardia]

You should use voxels for lots of detailed "high polys". Modern voxels are little 3D cubes and they look much better than the first generation 2D sprite voxels. I think LE should also use voxel terrain, since the polygon terrain has only problems with size and accuracy. Crysis and C4 uses voxel terrains too.

[Josh]

I would make a wide flat rock model and just align it to the cliff. Crysis used this technique, and the results are good.

[Gilmer]

yes, it would be good if leadwerks had this option, many things that i need do, need to own land in detail, like erosion, horizontal distortion ....

 

but what do you suggest for me to do, since it has no use as a voxel?

 

 

EDIT: humm, thanks josh, i will try this...

[Michael Betke]

Josh is right. Make yourself some rock templates which you scatter along the cliff. It#s up to you how detailed you do it. Use it in a modular way so you can stick together the rocks. It's not bad if the intersect.

[BrokenPillar]

Being able to use a POM shader for terrain textures would help as well. Then you can bake a normal, AO and parallax texture set and use it for both the underlying terrain texture and the individual rock pieces that you insert into it. That is how it is done in Crysis (you set a "3d Texture" check box for the terrain texture, which just adds a POM shader and map, if I recall correctly). Using the same (or a similar) texture set for the underlying terrain and the rock pieces is important to make it fit together without obvious seems where they meet.

 

Having the option to use POM would also work great for other terrain textures like cobble stones, cracked and broken asphalt, gravel, etc.

[Josh]

This might help:

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/06/cliff-rocks/

[Flexman]

This isn't a practical suggestion, just something that I think is pretty cool. Horizontal Displacement mapping.

Using shaders to apply fractal noise maps to pull out natural looking surface detail. Pretty advanced stuff, like a lot of things in GPU Gems (available for free in HTML format here) it leaves me scratching my head.

 

 

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/mod/journal/journal.asp?jn=503094

 

Clicking on this next link may induce a feeling of apathy and weeping (Gamedev journal showing recent progress).

 

 

As mentioned in an above post, some good rock models (Pure3D has a selection in his store) can be used to create nice cliff sections. See the

for an example of what can be done. Pretty amazing.

[Michael Betke]

Wow Flexman. This is great. A terrain would benefit so much of such technique. You only would need to place some small rocks for breaking up geomtry or some vegetation along the cliffs.

 

I would love to see this in a further LEadwerks version as an additional option. No other engine has this so far.

 

I really would like to know if it still looks good from the palyerview in a near distance.

[Gilmer]

thanks guys, i'll try to use methods that you passed, and thanks for the links..

later i post here the results...

 

thanks

[Josh]

It's trivial to add horizontal displacement to the terrain shader. I tried it before, but didn't see anything amazing. I think what you are mostly seeing in the above shot is a nice rock texture, and a little displacement along the normal improves the effect.

[Gilmer]

I did the conventional method, i create a high model in zbrush, and after, baked the normal. Take a look if I need to do something to improve:

 

 

 

 

thanks all for help

[wailingmonkey]

nice job, Gilmer.

 

(a small suggestion, update to ZB 3.5 r3 and utilize the surface 'noise' features for

stronger normal-map definition/variation)