Monday, 4 July 2016

Improving rock textures

Being dissatisfied with my previous rock textures, I set out todey to improve them somewhat. I went back to Mudbox and imported a few of the maps I'd made before. Setting the scene to flat lighting, I used ambient occlusion, cavity and edge-highlight maps to get the result below.
Using an image of a cliffside, found on cgtextures.com, I painted the texture directly on using it as a stencil. Making sure to align the sediment and avoid any stretching so it looked natural, this was quite a time consuming process. The result was worth the effort though, even with flat lighting the rock already looked much better than my last attempt.
With the new colour map finished, I needed to update my normal to include the crevices and cracks in the texture. Through Photoshop, using the xNormal plugin, I converted and edited the colourmap into a normal. This took a few attempts until I was satisfied with the result, after, I combined this new normal with the original using a simple overlay layer. At this point its more-or-less complete, the final touches were to tweak the colour range back in Photoshop and combine the ambient occlusion, cavity, etc.
Currently in my Unity scene, the rock textures used on the terrain had a slight brown colouration, so I tweaked the colour map to reflect this, its fit with the surroundings much better. I am very pleased with the results, and will certainly use the same process on future rock formations. 

In-engine pictured below






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