Modelling Stacked Stone Wall Cladding

[TomD_Arch]

I am wondering if anyone has some tips, suggestions, or tutorials to share that deal directly with modeling stacked stone wall cladding like the images below. Thank you!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]37639[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]37640[/ATTACH]

[jophus14]

If you are using Vray, you can go with a displacement. Other than that, maybe a bump or normal map will work.

[NoisyMonk]

I've done a few walls like this, and I haven't found a simple solution to get the proper look. Textures alone don't usually cut it if you're going to see the wall up close, especially if you want good lighting on it. I don't have VRay, so I can't say whether or not that is a good option.

 

For me, I get the best results by grinding it out and just modeling it. Grab a good texture, put it on a plane, and start tracing out the stones with splines. That particular wall seems nice and simple, with very straight edges, so it actually shouldn't be too bad (stones walls with lots of crooked edges and gaps are much more time consuming). Once you've got that done, extrude each spline to a slightly different height. You could make the whole wall unique if you really wanted to, or you could just do a quarter of it, and clone around the other parts and fill in gaps with individual stones. Obviously make sure the texture is plannar mapped and properly aligned onto the stones before you start moving them around - becomes very tedious to do that after moving the stones.

 

If you want to add even more detail, cut up the front faces of the stones, select the front faces and add a noise modifier. This will add that extra detail and shadows for the perfect look.

 

Hope this help, good luck!

Edited June 20, 2010 by NoisyMonk

[JonnyCache]

I am having the same problem trying to make this. Vray discplacement is not giving me the results I want. Anyone figure out a good way to go about this since this was first posted?

[mikebart]

I havent tried it out personally but theres a free script out for doing just this:

 

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/stone-placement-tools

[Peter M. Gruhn]

What I don't like about noise is that it is contiguous from rock to rock. I always have to do random selection and multiple noises with different settings.

 

I was just now looking at your fireplace/Imperial Star Destroyer and a very nice start came to mind - Greebles.

 

Start with a plane and use the generate topology tools in Graphite to turn it into irregular bricks or into regular bricks then select one short vertical edge and select similar then use Soulburn's selection randomizer to deselect a bunch of those edges. Then ctrl-bksp to delete the remaining. Maybe blow away some of the horizontals too, whatever works for the stone pattern you are after. This could give a nice base pattern for "how big and where" each stone should be. Then slap a Greeble on top of that for the random face extrusions; it'll even add a little taper which might make a generated displacement map happier, dunno. If you want maybe you do a per face inset before the greeble just to accentuate the gaps.

 

THEN you can drop a noise on for local variation and it won't matter if the noise is contiguous across blocks because it's at a finer scale. Maybe you chuck a subdivide on before the noise, just for more per block variety.

 

Then you can bake a normal map.

 

I'd test this out, but right now Max is crashing this machine so 1) you wouldn't get your answer; 2) I'm busy and need not to reboot right now.