Hello-
I work with a lot of stone, usually walls and fireplaces, and I am looking for a good way to handle it. Is the Cebas plug-in a viable solution?
which cebas plugin bobby?
Your link goes to a page of plugins but there are no stone plugins there
I have used volume breaker and I dont think it would work well for making stone.
Your best bet is photos and displacement maps.
Look at the arroway textures and cgtextures.com they both have tons of good stone maps to use
I own the arroway textures, but we get pretty spacific so they don’t work most of the time. The last sample on the Cebas link shows a stone wall, which seems perfect.
Looks like a good solution for what you need Bobby! Nice research.
But why o Why don’t they have a demo version??? I would love to check it out myself but without a demo that’s impossible.
What a pity.
Cheers
Jamie
There area few Scripts that do this you might want to try before buying a commercial plug in.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/voronoi-cells
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/fracture-voronoi
Type “Fracture” into the search function of SCript Spot and see what happens.
I bought the Cebas plug-in for an arch viz project and it is excellent, and support is A+
No affiliation, just wanted to recommend it because after messing around for about a day I was getting good results for the wet-laid stone retaining walls I needed.
(the project had about 25 oddly shaped stone walls and it was really fast to work with the plug-in.
It was expensive, but paid for itself in one/two days because it saved me days and days of labor, etc. not to mention making a fast deadline.
Oh, and it works very well for flagstone walks or patios, too. Once I got each wall okay, I save to mesh and export as vrayproxy. This way, it renders very fast and no displacement needed.
So how would you go about doing a gabion wall with volume breaker? like the example of the details page
Chris, Sorry but I never gave that any thought because I have never had to make one of those types…so I don’t know…
(Now the next job will probably have a gabion wall, hehe.)
I tried some of those scripts Mike posted and they break up geometry nice and with a turbo smooth you can get round-like rocks. I used a random material script to apply materials, which was nice. What you can’t do is have control over shapes.
OK. it seems that when I use a material override my displacement isn’t as effective. What I was trying to do is show materials and texture, but without color. I was applying a vraydisplacementmod on some geometry while using a vraydirt matieral as a meterial override, which was causing my poor results. If I apply the vraydirtmap to all my geometry and disable the materialoverride everything looks great and I get my desired results.
Cool 
I have used these for FX projects but for modeling was something I had not thought of
Hello, back from a nice long vacation and remembered this thread. jacks02 had asked how to make the gabion wall and now I have had a chance to re-open the scene
and see how I made my walls. Here is an old WIP of the project I mentioned, and if anyone thinks they look okay, I will try to share some of the process…These seem similar to the gabion, but no wire/cage stuff.
Sorry about the quality and smudged areas, can’t leave the client’s info on it yet.
That looks good and almost the results I was getting with the free scripts. I like it, but I didn’t like the stones that are vertical, which is what I was getting with the free scripts.
I think they look great. Count me in as interested in the process.
I too would be very interested in the process. 
Okay, I want to state that at first, I started with simple primitives and some extruded shapes, some “L” shapes and “U” shapes, I don’t think that mattered.
They were low poly to begin.
-Next I added the VB modifier
-Then, after some trial, crash, error, and tip from developer, I added turbosmooth mod, 1 iteration. Seems without this, the vb shows the cut lines, but the object is not broken yet.
-now go back to the VB mod and adjust settings
-For the grid, I used “homogeneous.”
-now is where a lot of tests come into play
Try to mess around with the homogeneous density and the raster values the most. These are in the grid part of the roll-out. I tried about all the stuff in the roll-out, but for now, these are the key players.
depending on your scene, end result, material technique, the rest may vary.
First, I chose 36 stone bitmaps that looked close enough to the existing walls I wanted to represent. (Some required downsizing.)
I made a folder for them and renamed them as “stone01D”, “stone02D”, etc…this part was the most tedious part of making all 25-27 of these walls
Then, I chose to go with a MaterialByElement mod set to…36, random distribution
-back to the VB mod roll-out
-look for the options area of it
-set MaterialID to match your number of stone bitmaps, for me it was 36
-Map Type = Box
-I won’t go into all the steps, but now make a material using all the stone maps and apply it to the wall, apply a box type uvw mapping mod.
So, in the end, I have a stack in this order
1-VolumeBreaker
2-Turbosmooth
3-MaterialByElement
4-UVWMapping
After this, copy and paste the stack to other walls if you need more than 1.
I did this and each time mess with the volumbreaker and materialbyelement seeds to keep variation
And, for some walls, I ended up adding optimize and/or subdivide mods beneath the VB mod. This was mostly because the scene was getting heavy, and from the camera distances, it didn’t seem to have much ill affect.
Well, I hope this can help someone like it did for me. I got this project and the deadline was just shy of 2 weeks away, for (2) 24"x36" prints. I work alone and thought I could never make all those walls alone in the alloted time so I looked around for anything that would help. I found a few things, but this one seemed like the best bet. The learning curve was all of 6 hours, maybe less. Actually, the material part really was the worst part for me, just so tedious. I got my walls and site base finished in a day and a half thanks to this plug-in and the client loved it and stated amazement. I must admit, I really regreted the purchase after the first hour, but now I look forward to my next project where I get to use it.
Sorry for the delayed response, I’ve been hunting big varmint in my gardens…
Thanks
edit, here is a screen during creation…
Hi All..
I bought Cebus Volume Breaker for exactly this task of making rocks…it sucks…please excuse the language
Then I bought RAYFIRE…Game over volume breaker
Ray fire has a much more robust fragmenting engine & you have sooo many more options to control exactly how you want the rocks to turn out. You even have different fragmenting types that are different than Voronoi & an option to interactively create your fragments/rocks with a mouse.
If you were to compare Volume Breaker & RayFire JUST for creating rock walls then Ray fire would win hands down…by a mile
But then you take into account That RayFIRE is a complete physics solution that is so easy to use & [Volume breaker can ONLY create framents/rocks] then I have to say that Rayfire is so far out in front it’s in a different universe.
Cheers
Hope this helps
Sounds sweet! I will definitely try it out sometime.
OT…funny how the word sucks has become so negative. Most things that literally suck seem like good things (vacuums, mouths, etc.)
Can you post any examples using Rayfire?
TIA
just looked at their website and definitely looks great, and not too pricey!