Rocks

[glorybound]

I am starting a project tomorrow with some rocks. How in the heck should I approach this?

[francomanko]

have you looked at quixel megascans..you might be lucky getting a rock outcrop 3d mesh of some sort.

[dgruwier]

Yeah, some combination of 3D scanned rock materials and models should probably do the trick.
It likely won't be at all accurate to the location, it'd just be a generic rocky lump. If they want accuracy, I'd say you need to do photogrammetry of the actual location.

[squintnic]

reckon megascans will be pretty useful here, might need to adjust teh colours a bit but otherwise will look great

[glorybound]

I didn't get the photo of the site until well after I quoted the project, which rubs me the wrong way. The project is one exterior view, so I am going to try and get a high-resolution photo of the angle. We'll see how it goes. I'll check out Megascan, which I know about, but never used.

[fixeighted]

You do get some awkward people don't you?!
Anyway it's unreasonable of them to expect an exact representation of the rocks, so I would suggest modelling their general appearance and applying the best suitable textures that you can find. That should be sufficient as it's mainly their size/shape/colouring that is important.
Get them to provide many many angles to assess their shape - at very high resolution may even give you useable texture info.

[joconnell]

If you wanted to try doing something new for the sake of self learning, you could try to photoscan the rocks on your cameraphone so you've got a shape guide and then fill in that silhouette / volume with scanned rocks. Meshroom is a free photo to model program that should do it!

[glorybound]

Yeah, however, 99% of my clients are 100's and 1000's of miles away. Over the past 5 years, I have done 2 projects for local architects. I might ask them to give it a try.

[glorybound]

I looked over Megascan, but I don't think anything will work. I had a job like this many years ago, probably 8 years ago at the time, I didn't even know about the script Drop, so I hand placed hundreds of boulders. I think I am simply going to use Forest Pro with a hand full of boulders.

[glorybound]

Here is an early proof. I am waiting for a landscape plan, which should liven things up. The rocks took me about 5 minutes using FP. They need work, but I think it'll work.

[fixeighted]

Oh, I thought it was just the ones circled - but anyway this'll look great with a bit of variation. Very cool that they incorporated it.

[glorybound]

Yeah, I'll have to change up the color variation, but that'll be easy. I have some early site photos and I assumed that it was construction debris, so I can't say that they dropped it on my after I quoted. I guess I shouldn't assume .

[fixeighted]

Well to be honest that is what I thought initially - lazy excavators

[Nicinus]

Still struggling getting grass right, so have to ask again, is that the photoshop trick or FP grass?

[glorybound]

Both. My render times are only about an hour for my exteriors, so I use FP grass to get edges and then PS to make it look real. The image I posted above is all FP.