Rocks revisited

Having felt somewhat defeated last time I tried rocks, I gave them another go.

Again, I tried making small parts of rocks in mudbox:

I made quite a few rock pieces, then loaded up 3D Coat. The plan here was to use their voxel-based sculpting to merge the several pieces together into one rock, so that they could then be sculpted together seamlessly.

However, when i started to sculpt them together they ended up looking strange and I was not able to get what I thought might work nicely. However, with them apart worked nice enough so I fiddled some then brought them into max for the retopology and baking.

I started off retopologising by hand, but this was taking a long time so I tried using ProOptimizer, which did a decent (ish) job and after some cleanup and unwrapping, I was ready to bake.

I used my Autobakerrr script and slapped the same rock material texture as the stone wall underneath the rocks. I'm really pleased with how well Autobakerrr is working, its really saving me time and gets such a nice result. Up until I baked the textures and applied them to the model, I was unhappy with the work so far, but once they had texture on them, they looked a million times better, and now I'm fairly happy with the look of these rocks.

I was a little concerned I had used too many tris, so as an experiment, I thought I'd make the low LODs to see how they came out. Surprisingly well is the answer! Also, bashing the same model together yielded a pretty nice result without obvious seams.

My only concern at this time is that its using a 1024 texture. I may have to make a detail texture and scale it down to 512 for efficiency's sake, but we'll see.