Good evening! Everyone loves rocks, right? Is the marketplace already saturated, geologically, or is there room for a small set of rocks for around $5? I intend to include 10+ meshes of various size, configuration, and complexity, and a couple of custom photo-sourced materials. Keeping in mind that the pack will be dirt-cheap, what sort of features would you like to see (LODs, material configurability, etc)? Included is a preliminary picture of what I have so far:
One problem I’ve noted while chipping away at these things is seams. Do you guys mind inconspicuous seams that can be hidden with other rocks/props, or would you prefer to have them painted out in the textures? Keep in mind that doing this requires many more separate textures/materials to support each mesh.
There’s never enough rocks in my opinion! I already bought one rock pack but would definitely buy more for more variety. I’d like to see LOD’s, material options would be good but chances are I’d personally use my own materials anyway.
In short, for a low price I’d definitely look at making and releasing a rock pack if I were you!
I’d buy it without even thinking of it for only $5. The time save is worth it. The more features the better obviously, but for $5 I’ll work with whatever ya give me.
I’m putting a little more work into the material than originally intended (price of pack will still be just $5 if it makes it, though). Each rock will of course have a unique normal texture, but will all share one detail diffuse texture and normal texture. To add some differentiation though, I’ve generated a series of masks using dDo for each mesh. In the material instance you’ll be able to set the tint and strength of each mask, to vary the look of the material. In this pic, I’ve added a bit of green in the crannies to make it look like moss, and a bit of tan on the edges to look like worn sandstone. Also visible is a separate “lichen” mask. I’m probably going to enable vertex painting to paint in the lichen layer so you can customize each instance of the rock a bit. Anyways, let me know if any of this is worthwhile or a waste of time
I’ve also hooked the lichen layer up to the red vertex color channel, so you can paint them in only where you want. There are two lichen layers, so you can have a couple of different lichen colors and sizes.
I’ve still got one more rock to finish (for a total of 10 rock meshes). There will be one master material and a instance for each rock. I’ll include 3 or 4 detail textures for variety (you can see two of them in the last couple of shots). Once I’m done with the last mesh, I’ll have to go back and fix some seams I’m not satisfied with (which will require rebaking of all textures ). I also need to get started on the LODs, but don’t think that’ll be too much trouble. Hopefully I can have this submitted by next week.
You can paint lichen on the rock using the red vertex channel. Green vertex channel dampens glossiness (if you turn the roughness down, that is…by default the rocks are pretty rough and non-specular). The rock includes LODs, and is representative of the other 9 rocks that will be in the pack.
Well, Necro’s Rock Box is complete! I’ve submitted it, but it might take awhile to make it to Trello (hopefully it does). I’ll post here with any news.
Well, I put the pack up on Gumroad! Still hoping I can get it on the Marketplace, but in case you are interested in it in the meantime, you can get it from that link. All of the textures are 2k, but I’m thinking of baking 4k textures and offering that as a free download.
New rock image:
). I also need to get started on the LODs, but don’t think that’ll be too much trouble. Hopefully I can have this submitted by next week.