How I Made Stylised Rocks in Blender

hello and welcome back to BB in this episode I'm going to show you how to make some stylized rocks and a technique that I like to use so let's get to it first of all let's have a little trip back to the future thank you doc so here are some sample rocks that I made as part of my testing uh yeah ignore that part there it's bit of a a normal map glitch in the viewport my bad so here you can see in the outliner the the rocks that you see in the viewport here which look rather cool I think I has a nice effect just turn on the wireframe now you can see get an idea of how these come together I like how these look with the um the bevel doing its job there so let's take a trip back ouch indeed this is how it all started just basic cubes which I then added some Loop cuts into and deformed the shape just a little bit to get a a starting point really and from that I added more Loop cuts and more detail not too much just enough to uh get started so as I mentioned in the trailer there's only a couple of modifiers you need for this effect and it's the bevel modifier with a limit method set to waight and a subdivision modifier which I've set to two and two so going back to the bever modifier the width type is of course width and the limit method more importantly is set to wait and if I tap into edit mode I turn off the modifiers now there's our geometry very basic and very simple so I've got some triangles there got some Eng gons which I probably should have fixed but it doesn't really make a difference and if I type into edit mode you notice these blue edges and these are the edges which are assigned a mean crease or a weight of one I should say so if I select this edge here you can see there you have a crease on the uh The Edge data sorry not the crease the bevel weight set to one so if I turn that off it goes back to its normal default color if I make it blue that means it has a weight of one so the bever modifi is really targeting those edges so let's cut cut cut I just wanted to put this in here you can add cuts into the Rocks because you are working with very simple geometry so you can see there just some basic knife cuts into the Rocks you can make them as long as short as you like so it's quite a nice effect but um I didn't really put too many in the rocks at this stage I might do later on you can see I did the same thing on this one here which I put all the way through to the bottom on the underside there so yeah that's the rocks that I created and the material of course which I'll cover in the next video so make sure you come back for that one okay with all that said and done buckle up and let's have a look at a practical example so I might go wrong in a few steps here but it may not look as great as the other ones but it'll give you the gist of how this works and how I put it together so I started off with a cube and I moved it up on the Zed axis by one so it sits on the invisible ground plane as it were and I then switch to x-ray mode and at this point all I did was move these vertices along like that and shifted those to the right a little bit there so just uh make these a bit wider at the bottom at the base now the goal of here is just to make a basic shape effectively for the rock could be anything could be a cube as it started off with um with some new sub Loop Cuts in there yeah and as you can see there I I found that um subdivided cubes work best other shapes can work too of course but um results May Vary so I just fast forward this fast forward this part because I'm just adding um some more extrusions there make sure you delete the bottom face there it's important so it stays nice and flat when we add the subdiv modifier so with that done I'm just going to deform the the overall shape a little bit add some Loop cuts and what you want to look out for here is square faces or approximately square faces so I'm only adding a couple of loop Cuts that's as much as I'm going to go maybe a little bit of proportional editing to deform the shape a little bit more but I'll leave that up to you you do what feel you do what you feel looks good and yeah GG you're going to use a lot doing this technique so here I'm selecting these face uh edges and pressing GG or the key the G key twice and that becomes an edge slide or a Vertex slide like I say I use this a lot and what I'm also doing is redistributing some of the other edges to make sure the density is your ni and uniform so once you've done that or the beginning of that anyway let's add the modifier and change that to weight at this point I should have really changed this amount value there but uh we'll do that later it's probably a little bit too big now 0.1 let's add a subdivision modifier and levels to two in the viewport as well and segments two on the bevel modifier that looks nice and smooth so now it's just a case of you customizing this rock to the look that you feel that you you're happy with and selecting edges and increasing its bever weight to one now there's no hard science to this it's it's what works you might find or you will find that as you make Cuts Like I'm doing here with the knife tool so I press k for that um you might find that that doesn't actually work well so you just remove the bevel weight and try another option so let's select these up here and press GG and slide them in so we got a nice curve there starting to to appear so let's make these ones as well give them a bever weight of one now sometimes this can work where you just leave the one Edge disconnected there but in this case there it didn't quite work so I'm going to put that to one as well and that gives it nice chamford Edge there so or bit around your model choose choose where to add the bevel weights and uh use the knife tool of course to go diagonally you don't have to do that but you can do if you want to deviate from the the existing edges I've done before this might seem like very it is tedious work but it doesn't take that long cuz you're constantly just selecting edges transforming them and B in edges as you're going to see here so you can take these parts here and bevel them and in the options here change it from offset to percent and increase that value there of course and it can work really well in some cases not so well in others so I do play around with that I think percent is really cool when it's used in the right places and uh let's make sure some of these don't always have the one value they might be just off so I'm just checking there to see that's correct the other thing you you can do is quite easily just select some very simple faces there and extrude them so I'm going to just press the E key and then uh Y for the y- axis and just bring them out just a touch what we can also do is use other editing tools like the sheer tool probably one of the most underused and yet awesome little tools there just click that and just share that left and right gives it more bit more bulk at the bottom now it's really important you don't have to if you can you know you can submerge the the rock or the stone beneath the ground surface or wherever you use it but I wanted to make sure that the bottom edges were all nice and flat so I selected some vertices pressed s for scale Z for the z-axis Z axis and then zero enter that just flattens them out and I put them at the location of zero so with that shape extruded now we can start playing around and testing to see how the bevel weights will behave here so you you'll probably see glitches like there it's pinching a little bit that doesn't look good and what you got after that is a nice flowing Senter of geometry so let's try these ones here you can see me hesitating there whether I should just try that let's try adding one there to make that flow across and again doesn't work well but there is a method to this that does work and I I'll get to that in a second so with that edge I'm going to press GG and Edge slide that to give that more of a graceful transition into the Rock you can see we got that horrible pinching at the bottom so we're getting there that's looking better but we're not quite there yet now these edges which you can't see I'm going to turn off the the bevel weight there and that's much better now let's get rid of that face at the bottom there cuz that's really breaking up our our lovely Rock so there we go so let's do the same at the top part now let's select these edges where we previously added a bever weight of one and reduce it back down to zero let's turn off the modifiers or the right one there we go so I can you can see what that looks like turn that back on and tab into object mode and that's looking really cool of course you can distress The Rock a bit more so again I'll fast forward this cuz it's pretty much rinse and repeat trial and error now and you want to just shift around faces edges vertices and make some more extrusions where you want to add more detail like this and once you got this technique down it really is quite simple and you get quick you get better at doing it quicker and uh and you can see there I'm also redistributing it's quite an important part keep Shifting the edges um so they're not very close to each other and all bunched up in a a tight bundle cuz that will cause could proa could cause problems with the bevel modifier which I'll show you later on I'm also using the normal um some switching from Global to um to normal for the or transform orientation that sometimes helps to shift things a bit more naturally so I do play around with those and here I'm selecting using the knife tool again to Make Some Cuts I'm going to select these faces there and create an inser and then an extrude and then again redistributing the density of the edges and faces once again mix around the um the vertices there distribution and play around with the the vertex weights or the edge B I should say let's have a quick look at the bevel modifier settings and as I said earlier I should have changed the amount to 033 that's what worked for me at this scale of an object and I put a little person figure there which is 1.8 m toall so anyway going back to the if you encounter this problem look out for this and you know how to fix it so what you don't want to do is let's just take this vertex and move it down by pressing GG I put it very close to the other one let's turn on the modifier again you can see we got some horrible pinch in there of course however if I change the value it doesn't seem to work you can see I've gone right up to 4 M there but it's made absolutely no difference to the bevel that's because there a problem in that area and it just won't work so do do look out for that and uh let's put that back to how it was okay so let's think about adding more detailed and visual interest to our rocks so you can see these areas here where I've just um added more Cuts uh insets and extrusions and more Edge uh weights bever weights so here I'm going to do uh the same thing uh create some faces select some faces create an inser and extrude those and redistribute the um the geometry a little bit to make it bit more a little bit more organic looking and using GG to slide some edges around and now you can practice you can see it doesn't look quite right there so we need to do some more work so redistributing tweaking trial and error and making some more Cuts if you need to or even going step back and merging some of the vertices that you have there that's the great thing about this technique is you can work with really simple geometry and create some really interesting shapes let's make a cut there maybe bring that out using the normal orientation and that one there as well when you get this lovely flowing top there kind of looks really cool now you can we use the knife tool to add a bit more detail there and then recess and push that geometry further down and that will help emphasize not just the material but the shading as well um of the stone and a good tip switch over to matte cap the red one the metallic paint and look for any pinching or bad shading effectively so make sure the Highlight as it travels across your object it looks nice and crisp and lovely so really use useful way of checking your model doesn't matter what you're modeling it really helps to identify any problems so I I tried to do uh the same thing with a sphere or a UV sphere I guess not a UV sphere a quad sphere and um I mean it wasn't as good as the other Stone but I really kind of rushed it to show you you can apply this technique to different shapes different objects and get a cool looking result so spend more time on that of course than I did on this one and you can see there that would look quite cool so there are the stylized rugs I hope that was useful so in the next video I'll show you how to create this material and uh of course thanks for watching like And subscribe if you like the video I'd really appreciate that and I'll see you in the next one bye for now

Channel: Beyond Blender

Views: 1,552

Keywords: low poly, blender tutorial, blender 3d, blender 3.0, low poly modeling blender, low poly modeling, blender beginner, blender tutorial modeling, blender 3d tutorial, blender material tutorial, 3d tutorial, 3d blender tutorial, lowpoly rock, low poly rock, blender tips, stylised art, how to model stylised art, stylised rock, blender stylized rock material, blender stylized rock, low poly rocks blender, low poly rocks modelling, bevel modifier, stylized rocks blender

Id: oGelyKaYHPQ

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023