rOCK tIPS
rOCK tIPS
With a little bit of careful texturing, objects created by Rockgen can look pretty convincing.
The Granite Procedural is a great place to start for rock textures, and that is what I used for 'Rocks'. Each rock has slightly different values, but all are based around these numbers:
| color 1: | R:190 G:215 B:120 |
amount: | 0.5 | scale X: | 1 |
| color 2: | R:140 G:100 B:75 |
amount: | 1 | scale Y: | 1 |
| color 3: | R:90 G:60 B:40 |
amount: | 1 | scale Z: | 1 |
| color 4: | R:130 G:70 B:50 |
amount: | 1 | sharpness: | 0.2 |
Color 1 is a greenish yellow that gives the appearance of patches of lichen.
Texture is important for rocks, but not nearly as much so as the bump map - the right map with the right UV repeats will really jazz things up. The bump image used on these rocks was BLOTCH1.JPG (included in the Rockgen distribution), with UV repeats of either 2 or 3. I created all of the bump maps in Photoshop using the Clouds, Noise, and multiple Difference Clouds, tweaking the brightness and contrast along the way.
The anti-aliasing setting can have a substantial impact on the appearance of bump maps. This particular scene was rendered at 3x. I usually use either 2x or 3x for all of my images - 1x will give you a bad case of the jaggies, and 4x can sometimes make bump maps look a bit strange.