Help wanted creating procedural rock cliffs.
Khoe
Posts: 293
is there a tutorial or something similar to create rock needles or large boulders. I have attached 2 pictures. I want to build something like that. has anyone done this before.
Post edited by Khoe on
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I recall @EvilProducer making a landscape similar to the Dells in Wisconsin. See the following link and decide if it is similar to what you are trying to do. The freebie has been deleted, I think, but we could find some more of his 'how to...' posts.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/262431/carrara-river-dells-freebie
oh, i remember, that's not bad but i'm more interested in the prominent rock formations. You probably won't get that with the terrain editor, it won't be steep enough.
Couple of screenshots of EP's Dells scene
in the terrain editor steepness is just
a ratio controled by height.
you can get steep
but uploadin a file is iffy now
ep dell's is very good as Bunyip said.
Just for fun I googled free online rock generator and found a plugin for openscad -
this one Free STL file Rock Formation Generator・Design to download and 3D print・Cults (cults3d.com)
never used openscad before - fiddled with afew paremeters and exported the result as an stl then opened in 3d builder and exported it as an obj and bought it into carrara
I used Philemenon's plugin triplaner to wrap around a rock texture, then just for fun I set the camere as top view and rendered out a depth map and bright that back into carrara and used it in the terrain editor
as far as tghe depth map, whacking it with some erosion scratched in photoshp helped, also adding some dieplacement in the shader
to get good feeling of bird pooping on the rocks I'd take the resulting shader and plug it into a terrain shader - eg the snow one and where there is snow add a similar texture but just make it lighter
and what shlomi laszlo said
ill put a few pics up
in a mo
with a bit of erosion
rough render
Good call, Headwax!
The way he did it was to actually model it. It's really cool. He's good too, because the scene weight isn't bad at all, so we can load a Lot of them.
One obvious thing to avoid would be to Not bevel the edges and then play with those polygons. I have some sets that don't have the extra geometry and they just don't look good.
When I was tasked with extending real cliffs and making giant waterfalls of stone, my boss sent me to some waterfalls just to get my eyes on what nature did, That is an excellent idea. You'll get home, fire up Carrara, hop into the vertex modeler, and start making cubes!!!
That's also the perfect place to take some photos for the textures.
On another note, Materialize (free) can help in a Big way by allowing you to create your own custom normal maps from any image - grayscale or not. Normal maps of natural stone outcroppings would be a real boon to your efforts!
Things like cracks, crumbles and debris can become awfully 'weighty' in the scene if modeled, so displacement or normal mapping would be the way to go for that. If photography of real stone is out of the question, try a nice image pack that you buy or get for free. Or even paint them? I love painting, but not everyone does. I fire up PD Howler and let my imagination go to work!
I wish they wouldn't have culled all of the Carrara assets from the store. Oh wait... Howie Farkes might still have some available that just might have cliff rock?
mmoir had a thing called Mystic Gorge. I'm so glad I bought that because it's gorgeous! It's a temple built into cliffs with a massive footbridge crossing the gorge. Massive set with islands, trees... the architecture too was brilliantly assembled using duplication to keep the scene weight really small for such a monster of a scene.
Island Butte, also by mmoir was another excellent example of modeled cliffs.
Using these as examples after not opening them for years, I just had an epiphany over something mentioned earlier - the Terrain Editor:
The terrain made using the Terrain editor doesn't have to stay like that once you're done. We can select parts that we really like, invert selection and delete, then play with what's left over. Rotate it so it goes up and down, manipulate it into diffrent shapes, keeping the gist of the procedural modeling intact, etc., etc.,
In one of PhilW's tutorial courses on Carrara, he used the terrain modeler to make a bookcase full of books!
When the "Dartanbeck Presents..." comes on screen (20 seconds or so in) we're seeing the Mystic Gorge by mmoir
This image is using a preset from Andrey's Stones and Structures product
Andrey also has some packs of just stones along with addon packs for snowy textures and such - just puttin' it out there
one can also model a selection of rocks in the vertex room (or use some of the excellent Traveller and RDNA sets) then use a surface replicator to add them to a terrain or other structure to give a rocky outcrop
Right. That's what I meant at first, but I'd build by hand rather than replicate. But that's just me.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we also had MetaCubes?!!!
Just an FYI from my situations:
I really like using these. I'm always too pressed for time to make something like this myself, and with these available, it was a real win.
What I really like about these two in particular is that they're collections of already clumped together rock formations, that we can clump together to make whatever we want - and we can have moss and plants in the cracks if we want with the click of the mouse. And also because they look so real. Andrey did a beautiful job with them. I haven't tried them in Carrara yet though.
I also bought the expansions for them, offering more texture options and snow
nice find - yes shop bought sometimes good
I like the romance of cararara's own custom landscape shaders though
actually I use yours frequently
Yes. I do too. I found these when I was looking for solutions for Daz Studio, and I'm glad I did. I ended up collecting a whole bunch of Andrey's products and like every one of them. Now I find it hard not to use them when I need natural rocks.
This very short video was made to illustrate a point regarding dForce, but the scene it's in is really interesting. It's Andrey Pestyakov's Stones and Structures and to make the water move (since I wasn't in Carrara) I scaled down and duplicated ThePhilosopher's iReal Animated Ocean Water, and apply the same water shader to that which came with Andrey's amazing set.
If you look in the distance btween the cliffs, you can see the fog gushing in from a (imaginary) waterfall just around the bend. I did that in post using elements from ActionVFX, but could just as easily used effects I made right here in Carrara. The sky, the terrain, the fog, and Rosie are all separate elements stitched together in DaVinci Resolve.
Tahnks for Info- i have order the stons :)
So, when you get them, try whatever ways you like. But I'd just like to add that it might be easier to assemble the formation you like, with whatever plants, etc., that you like in Studio first, then save as a scene subset to your library. Then load that into Carrara and start optimizing your shaders.
But it might just as well be as easily done entirely in Carrara. Try it. I will try eventually, but haven't got that far yet.
I will try the different ways.
I bought the stone pack and the additional shaders but I just can't get the textures according to Carrara.
Only the basic texture (image map) is transferred with no moss, no bump, no disp. Masks etc are also missing
is there a trick?
I tried to save stones with texture in studio as a scene
Export as Obj Here, too, the individual textures and bump/displacement are missing when exporting.
as Fbx the same
The same result also occurs when exporting as DAE.
kind of a texture baking? or somehow convert everything.
I think it depends on the layers in the textures.
Thanks
Most Daz products don't load shaders into Carrara properly. Some things might look somewhat okay without modification, but never how they should be.
I'm in the middle of a rather lengthy dForce simulation right now. When that's done I'll load up Carrara and the stones and make a shader tutorial for you.
He's using normal maps for additional mesh detail and masks for layering moss, etc.,
For this we need to build a shader.
Carrara never loads normal maps from a preset unless it's a Carrara preset that contains one. Otherwise we always have to add them ourselves.
It'll be easier for me to explain masks and stuff once I have Carrara open.
Oh yes, that would be great. I always struggle with trial and error.
so manual work is required. Ok thought that maybe there was something like Iray after 3dlight.
That would be something for the plugin programmers ;)
I will let Dart handle the tutorial side of things.
Plugin programers have already made a PBR plugin - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4625561/#Comment_4625561
Just about done with the tutorial
Okay let's try this.
First of all, I'm not sure what method you used to load yours in. From the StonesHR folder in my Content browser, I loaded Stones 07a with Plants, and everything loaded in with basic texture maps for color as usual.
The way I load these DUF files is to locate them in the browser and double-click them.
I know you know your way around Carrara, so I'm going to start brief. Just ask if anything is unclear.
This is my result after optimizing the texture in my quick n' dirty way of doing it
I simply loaded the same thing in Daz Studio so I could see which maps he's using. He shares maps across products, so the maps needed for this particular set of stones are in three separate folders: "Stones HR" (stones, moss, etc.,), "Nature FF"(Plants) and "Nature PP1"(Leaves)
In DS, he's using both bump and normal maps on the main stones. I'm only using the Normal. Note that the Color map used and the corresponding Bump that matches get titled 5x5, but the normal map does not, nor does the mask I'm using in the second image (moss)
So your shaders will be just basic -
That's it for the stones.
For the plants I did pretty much the same thing except they don't need any tiling. But they also get an Alpha Map "A" and a Translucency map. Again, I used the normal map in Bump and the Bump map in Highlight.
Here's my second image
For this one I used the Mixer function to add the moss. If you've never used a mixer before, take a look at the far upper right of the image below. Instead of choosing "Texture Map", we go Operators > Mixer.
This gives us two source nodes and a Blender.
Use the original texture map in Source 1, which will already be loaded if it was already there, and whatever we want to mix over it in Source 2 - in this case, the Moss image in the Stones HR folder.
There are two masks for Stones 7. These are what we use in the Blender. Just set the Blender to Texture map and load the moss image - or any image for that matter.
In this situation, Sources 1 & 2 each get tiled 5x5 but the Blender doesn't get tiled.
Now use the Cntrl (Cmd) key to drag the mixer from the color channel to the Highlight channel and change the Source 1 and 2 maps to the Bump versions of each of them. Leave the Blender alone. It already has the right map. By copying Color over to Highlight, we don't have to repeat the tiling process.
I hope this helps. These are some really nice rocks! If you have ANY questions, just ask!
I should mention that I used to combine normal and bump maps together, but I no longer use that route. However, if you'd like to try it:
Set the Bump channel to Multiply and set one to Normal map and the other to Texture map.
I think it might even be better to use the multi-layer system and blend them however you like, but I've never tried that as far as I recall. I probably did. I experimented a lot with that. It basically gives use Photoshop layers directly in the shader and was introduced in one of the final updates for Carrara. It's really nice!
Just change the main node to Multi-Layer
Then click the + symbol below it to add as many layers as you like.
The usual blending methods are there: Multiply, Add, Subtract, etc., but also an opacity slider for each element. Just like Photoshop... kinda.
I should also mention that we can Invert the Blending mask as well. So we can try different effects with the mask.
In short, a blending mask mixes Source 1 with Source 2. White = Source 1 and Black = Source 2 with shades of gray blending between them accordingly.
I make my own custom blending maps any and every time I get the urge!
The Blending map I used for the second image is the first one: Plant 7 Mask 01
It blends the moss into nooks and crannies without going overboard. It's even a bit hard to see the difference. Invert that mask, however, and we Really see moss!
I haven't tried Mask 2 yet.
This might work really nice for stacking a bunch of the together. It's the same thing, but with the mask inverted in both Color and Highlight channels.
I actually did it just so we could see the difference.
The stones rendered in Iray