Saturday, September 4, 2010

Blender Tip: How to make realistic rocks



Hey there!  Have you ever wondered how to make your stone textures look more realistic?  Well today I'm going to show you a quick trick that will make almost any image based stone texture look real using a single procedural texture!  Lets get started.

For this turorial, I'm going to use this quick rock model.


I would encourage you to model and sculpt your own but if you like, you can download mine from here ---> rock.blend (1 Mb)

UV unwrapping

Lets start by UV unwrapping our rock model.  In Edit Mode (Tab) with all vertices selected (A) hit U and select "Unwrap".  Open up a UV/Image Editor and discover something that looks like this:




That was easy!

Colour map

In the header of the UV Editor under the "Image" menu, select "Open", navigate to your rock texture and open it.

If you don't have one, you can download this ---> http://robo3d.com/images/stoneTexture.jpg


In the 3D view you can hit Alt+Z to view the texture on the rock model in real time.

Materials

In the "Material" buttons, hit the big "New" button.


In the "Texture" buttons, hit the big "New" button.


Change the "Type:" to "Image or Movie", set "Coordinates: to "UV" and in the "Image" panel, using the dropdown menu beside "New", select your image.


We're done with that texture.  Now comes the cool part (muhahahahaha)

Bump mapping

Select the texture slot below the first texture and add a new texture.


In the "Clouds" panel toggle "Hard" and set "Depth:" to 4.  In the "Influence" panel unclick "Color", select "Normal" and set it to 1.3


If we render now (F12), you'll see that it looks good.......


.......except it's too shiny.  Lets fix that.

Go to the "Material" buttons and in the "Specularity" panel change "Intensity" to .2

and no, you shouldn't see a happy face on yours ;)

Render now and it is complete!  Yay!  I hope you can use this trick to make awesome looking rocks for your own projects!  Happy Blending!

2 comments:

  1. hmm, have to follow this tutorial, those rocks look awesome :D

    anyway, I was wondering, would it be ok if I added your blog to my new "Blender sites" page on my blog? I've completely redesigned, and there's a section with Links to other Blender sites and bloggers :D

    ReplyDelete