Project files for anyone interested:
https://gum.co/rpOSZ
With my love of anything rock related and being inspired by the work of Daniel Castillo's rocks, I felt like doing my own game ready set of rocks. I sculpted 5 main hero rock pieces inside Zbrush which were decimated down and duplicated inside Maya to create a basic layout. I made sure the rocks were sculpted in a way they could be flipped over, rotated and re-used, even when the textures are applied. I used Nanomesh to array simple rock meshes, using the ground terrain as the base. The smaller nanomesh rocks were baked into the ground texture and the medium nanomesh rocks had some zbrush noise applied with minimal manual sculpting added on top. The same Painter material was used for both Hero and medium sized rocks. All 5 hero rocks had extra layers applied to each inside Painter to offset similarities from the base material. All textures were baked inside Painter with the exception of the cavity map in which I used Marmoset's baker for. The majority of the time was spent on the high poly hero rock sculpts with the ground and surrounding rocks being done rather quickly so I would like to have spent more time nesting the rocks into the surrounding environment and I think presenting them with a vertex blended terrain would tick the box for me next time.