Blender rock formation help?

[ardent red]

Hey all,

I've been trying for a few weeks now to create a cliff in blender which looks similar to these ones: Experiments with the fractal, noise and displace functions didn't work- the results were too angular and not long enough (I'm aiming for a curved, flowing look). Does anyone know of any ways to make rock of this shape?

Thanks,
ardent red

[Chacal]

You will probably achieve most of the effect by a clever use of textures, rather than by trying to shape the model perfectly.

[Aloys]

Hmm, the Antelope canyon, such a beautiful place.. (although I've never been there )
That's a complex rock formation, difficult to reproduce.. The displace modifier might help but you'd need to create a very specific texture to get a good result..
I'm afraid you'll have to manually edit a mesh (any grid or a sudivided cube). That might no sound too exciting, or easy, but that's probably the best option. Also, a bit of help of the subsurf modifier should make that look smoother.

[ardent red]

I'm afraid you'll have to manually edit a mesh

*think happy thoughts... think happy thoughts...*
well... I'm up for a challenge. I survived the creatively evil blender user interface, after all! Perhaps sculpt mode would help. I'll look into it.

You will probably achieve most of the effect by a clever use of textures

Hmm, textures are unexplored territory as of yet, but I'll have to learn how to make them eventually. Perhaps a texturing guru should start a classroom a bit like Jennifer's, except for texturing tutorials (both photographed and 'painted' kinds)? I'm sure many people would find it useful.

Thanks for your help so far, guys!

[Jojon]

Hmm, the Antelope canyon, such a beautiful place..

"Aaaaah, Direbo. Such a peaceful place."

Is there something we should know, Aloys?


@red:

You'll need to sweep a profile curve. I haven't looked into any automated tools of Blender's for this, but here's one (of many) ways to do it manually:

Take a side view and add an empty mesh.
Hold down ctrl - now you can place a succession of connected vertices.
Draw a profile curve of a wall cut-section, or a canyon cutsection, if you want to do the walls on both sides at the same time.
Change to top view, select all vertices in the profile you drew and again hold down ctrl - now each left-click will extrude a copy of your profile and rotate it according to the direction you are "moving".
You can modify each section as you go, to assure a smooth change over time, or go in afterwards in sculpt- or proportional mode.

[electroglyph]

For your textures you can use Bryce. You can get a full version of the previous release at Cnet.
http://www.download.com/Bryce/3000-6677_4-10696716.html?cdlPid=10696717 122mb download.

There are several procedual textures like arizona or grand canyon that will generate this texture. I would suggest you create a terrain using the slick rock fractal and apply the grand canyon texture to it. Slick rock will create scallops similar to the ones in you image. You can apply this kind of texture to a fairly flat surface and still get curves. Here's a texture I created in about 10 minutes.



You should apply this to the side of your mesh to get this same banding effect.

[ardent red]

Woo! I now have one good looking canyon, smooth and beautifully textured! (looks great in-game too!)

However, in the process of texturing the canyon, I made several textures in bryce and tried them all out, to see which looked best. Once I had decided, I exported the age, and it took forever- it was converting all the textures I wouldn't use as well. From what I've read, it seems that you can stop a texture being mapped to an object (which I already knew) but cannot remove them completely. Is there a way to do this?

[Nadnerb]

Textures should be automatically cleaned up by blender once they are not used by anything. (This includes both materials, and UV layers) If you open the uv edit window and bring up the list of textures, "orphan" textures (those which are not used by anything) will have an "O" next to them. These will not be saved when you save your blend file. Then, when you open the file, they should be gone from the scene.

[ardent red]

Here's a picture (EDIT: not picture, link to the picture) of the canyon in-game:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sehltahn/2549670775/

Yeh, not too pretty- but the textures and the rock walls were made using the hints and tip offered in this thread. Oh, but not the textures on the strange rock in the center. *cough* quickly found on google images *cough*

Thanks again for your advice, everyone- it's made this age look much better than it would have if I did it alone!

Now- onto reflective water . But those problems will be for another thread, heh.