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:

Blender Tip: Removing texture seams

(updated the tutorial for Blender 2.53 Beta)

One of the struggles I face when UV texturing models is dealing with texture seams.  But there's a few little tricks that can be used to surmount this problem.

Method #1: Smearing

It's a new feature in Blender 2.5's Texture Paint mode.  This technique works best with rust/grunge type textures.

I'm going to use one of my robot characters as an example.  Notice the seam in his texture.

With the textured object selected, go to Texture Paint mode.  Hit T to bring up the toolbox and select the Smear brush.

Then just smear around on the seams of your model and watch them disappear.  Don't forget to play with the Size and Strength values to get better control over smearing.

That's the technique.  If you take your time, it's possible to blend your seams together with minimal manipulation of the texture itself.  Practice makes progress :)  And of course, the texture may need some tweaking after seam removal (because none of us are perfect...neither is Blender :P ).


Method #2: Cloning

This technique uses another UV texture layer as a clone source which is cloned onto the rendered texture.