How To Carve Rock Textures In Foam

i've created this library of foam carving techniques for creating rock texture effects and i'm going to share them with you right now hello welcome to breath of life development my name is josh foreman and today we are going to be carving ashler ashler ashler ashler yeah i i've been making ashler most of my professional career whether for video games or models or sculptures or whatever i just i had no idea what the individual like rocks are called and i guess if you chip and carve the rocks into a shape before you put them together into a wall that's ashler building as opposed to just taking field stones or found stones and mortaring them together that's called rubble building i also found out that one width of rocks is called a width with yeah so uh hey you learn something new and useless every day now let's get to work shall we uh this is super cool um kind of a blast to the past back in the 90s when i started getting into professional video game development one of the things i did a lot of was textures look at all these guys that i made for the game descent three uh i spent years making textures so i just i love textures i love figuring out how to make something look like something else it's just fun so right now i'm developing this massive diorama this is just a little part of it and i figured while i was doing that why not share my progress my learnings uh with you guys i think i think i like this so much that i may be doing specialized videos on the specific kinds of stone and my goal is to be able to take any reference image of ruins or castles or a cliff and be able to reproduce that in foam i'm not quite there yet but i'm i think i'm getting close and this board here gets me one step closer without further ado let's just dive right in and start carving foam all right so i'm starting out by simply cutting a bunch of sample bricks i'm not going to be using hot wire cutting for anything else you should be able to follow along with mostly household items i'm going to be making two of each of the textures just drawing out a grid so that i can keep track of these as i go now if there is one continual theme that you take away from my channel please let it be always always look at reference look at all this reference i got so i threw together a bunch of different flavors this is the kind of ashler style wall you see a lot in miniatures because i think this is naturally what happens when you scry some lines into a flat foam and it's totally valid totally fine i just want to be able to have as much variety available to me as possible so i'm kind of skipping over this style and looking for others so as i've been teaching myself to sculpt and carve foam i've been keeping all the useful tools in this bin so i'm going to try to categorize these for you now this battery charger for a 10 year old camcorder probably isn't very useful not sure how that got in there but yeah so here we go let's see if we can categorize these coherently we've got smashers hammers that sort of thing we've got uh let's see i would call these pressers because you just you press them into the foam uh here's a couple that i made by putting epoxy um like a steel stick type of epoxy over a cylinder and then adhering sand and gravel to it and then you've got various slashers knives cutters i went to a second hand store and bought a whole bunch of knives for real cheap and a sharpener to keep them sharp we've got pokers stabbers and rasper sander thingers rasping and sanding this kind of goes in between pokers and sanders it can be used both ways and finally you have chemicals such as acetone nail polish remover works for this so does super glue okay let's talk about hammers i have this cool little mallet that has a rubber side and a plastic side and it came with two different heads for each so i took one of the heads and just sanded it down in kind of an abstract shape so that i wouldn't get you know consistent round pits every time i use it [Music] and yeah you'll get a slightly different effect when you're hitting with the rubber in versus the plastic end but basically you just get these really authentic cracks when you start smashing your foam and sometimes when it chips off on the edge like that i like to just pull it out especially when you're working on bricks separately it's a really great effect and then yeah i just like having several different sizes on hand to keep things varied [Music] and again when you're working on individual bricks you have the opportunity to really mess with the silhouette that your brick makes and i promised i wouldn't call these bricks these are not technically bricks they are stones that are ashler style okay and just coming through again and seeing how consistent the effect i can get looking for more opportunities to add a little more interest and variability to the surface [Music] all right let's look at pressers oh yeah that actually this reminds me so when you get the foam there are the edge pieces kind of like you know there's in pieces on bread the edge pieces of foam tend to have a kind of interesting texture i love this one i wish i knew how to reproduce it i think it's made by some kind of circular saw at the factory but i haven't figured out how to get that yet anyway when it comes to making an impression this is really complicated let's see if you guys can follow along um i i press i press the stuff into it yeah and i like to have my uh my foil ball have several different features on it so that you get a little irregularity in there [Music] and when you've got your separate stones going around the edges and the corners is great [Music] now see in this case it actually broke the surface which gives it another really interesting characteristic all right here's one of my cylinders my custom-made cylinders you could do this by getting a chunk of pvc pipe putting propoxy 20 over it and then just sprinkling sand on it uh after that i gave it a wash with super glue and it's a really handy thing to have [Music] this is giving me a really uniform surface it reminds me of this kind of i don't know it's probably sandstone or something like that and then this knobby boy uh exactly the same thing just sprinkled on sand but in this case i embedded these big chunks of gravel and i tried to point out the the point sharpie ends on one side and then on the other side i have a lot more subtle so that i can i can get the variety that i crave [Music] i love those pits and holes that this can produce and then here is pretty much the same thing i just put the propoxy on the tip of a tool and this makes it so that i can add detail when i've got the a whole wall and i'm just doing trying to pick out little bricks here and there now we have little chips of rock that i got at the hardware store this is for gardening and stuff i guess i believe these are marble chips right here and different shapes will give you different effects so i like to just dig through the bag from time to time and find ones that the ones that i find the most useful i keep out and just have them on hand and this is some kind of a pumice rock again used in landscaping it just has a subtly different texture so you're going to get a different look with it especially when they're very holy like this it's essentially doing the opposite of the sand pressing where it's leaving little bumps rather than little divots okay it's stabby time so i believe this is a cleaner for grills or something i'm not even sure but uh it makes really great super fine pitted surfaces [Music] and then you got your classic toothpick uh which is great but you know it's kind of slow so i have these tools rakes and tools that i made myself just by gluing a bunch of wires together and that speeds up the process quite a bit we've got several different gauges [Music] and for big holes i've got these barbecue skewers which i use for lots of different things but ultimately it's not much different than just using a pen or a pencil i like these ones that have graduated thickness of tips so i can get a lot of variety with one tool [Music] slightly different than using say a pencil or in this case a pottery shaper thing you know just the size and shape of the tip is going to give you a lot of variety so just be on the lookout for things that you can stab into the foam to get different effects so this end is more of an impressor less of a poker [Music] and sharpies give you nice sort of rounded divots and the classic pencil pretty much like a sharpie but doesn't leave a black mark all right i'm compiling all of these onto my board which reminds me box of rocks method so this is kind of its own category it's basically throw things in a box full of rocks and shake it my rocks are really dusty so i have to wear a respirator i don't i don't know if you'll have this problem but yeah be safe y'all all right now we have our slashers depending on how sharp your blades are it's going to give a slightly different effect the duller it is the more you're going to be dragging bits and making little um like these little triangle rows that haunt me they're okay here and there but when there's a consistent row of them that's where i'm really unhappy [Music] so this is kind of a stylized look it's not usually what i go for i strive for realism personally but this could definitely fit into a lot of different styles and then you can just get a ton of variety just varying the direction the depth you're dragging your blade the number of strokes [Music] etcetera and then usually whenever i have the opportunity i end up picking at the surface just to create more pits and scars i just love that variety of surface and sometimes you can get slightly different effects by using a serrated blade you know it tears in a slightly different pattern sometimes [Music] but most of the jaggies on the edge come about strictly by tearing the foam see here's a straight blade versus a serrated blade can you tell the difference not really but you can get a little more variety in the depth when you use the blade to press down as opposed to cutting so yeah not profoundly different but different enough that it's worthwhile having that in your arsenal you can see the slight difference between pressing with a straight blade versus a serrated another great thing to do with slashers besides slashing is poking this is where things get really messy when it comes to trying to categorize these tools because you can use so many of them in different ways so i was jabbing and now i'm picking so i'm getting kind of a nice swiss cheese rock look you know you see this stuff from time to time in ruins old castles all right time to move on to the melty melty so acetone is whatever it is it dissolves the foam i've experimented with using spray paint super glue and other kind of solvents and they more or less they all do the same thing it leaves sort of a scabby skin that you can pick away if you like or you could leave it um if you're doing kind of lava rock and that kind of stuff this is perfect just leaving the skin like that you know something that's supposed to be melted by acid well this is literally melted by acid my understanding is this is actually how they do the alien slime effect in the movie alien melts through the floor and yeah depending on how much is loaded into your brush you can get bigger or smaller little specks another way to get small specks is to flick it with your brush make sure your eyes are covered when you do this oh dear god make sure your eyes are covered now the brush was loaded pretty heavily there so it's gonna kind of uh just do another big melty spot now the brush is unloaded a bit you can see the smaller little speckles [Music] and since these grow with time you need to be a little bit patient you need to do some spatter wait for a couple seconds and see the [Music] effects okay another one i'm not sure how to categorize exactly but i've done this a few times if you want sort of a marbled effect i find that just pressing hard with a large sharpie can get you that finding a few of the areas to sort of stroke several times to keep it deeper um it gives you variety it's fairly subtle but if you color it with a you know more of a marbled color pattern then i think this could be really cool looking and just for a little more variety using a finer tipped sharpie okay now i'm mostly using the blade here in a scraping picking motion rather than slashing and then moving to the wood tool to get yet another slightly different look a little bit softer tears [Music] and this is a place where tweezers can be useful um okay so not these particular tweezers they're okay but mostly slipping out of my grasp [Music] fortunately i have a bevy of tweezers a plethora of tweezers if you will almost all of which are universally terrible for this but here are the real champs [Music] so yeah this is just it's just plucking it's all i'm doing i'm just plucking now you'll notice i'm purposely rotating my blade a bit so that it's not slicing through it's doing almost all tearing okay sandpaper here's a cool thing uh if you want your rock to look weathered or a little polished do some sanding i like sanding sponges for this kind of thing because they can conform to the edges pretty well and having a variety of grits is always useful too so you can refine it and if you just want fairly smooth you know rounded edge ashler style stone you can just do nothing but sanding here you can see a little bit of that tearing that i was talking about if you have a dull blade or you know you're obviously sanding as well can cause this you get this repetitive little triangular divots if they're small enough it's hard to notice unless you look close though all right rasps are more or less the same thing as sanding you know the finer your rasp is the smoother and more compression it's going to do as opposed to actually abrading and carrying away material so see in this case i was almost completely compressing to make this line there's a little bit that's being pulled away but for the most part it's just being compressed which means you could literally use a butter knife to accomplish almost the same thing but yeah having a variety of these little files and rasps is super handy now the surface property of the top of the board versus the sides or parts that you have cut with a hot wire or a knife are all going to be slightly different so i want to do a little bit of experimentation with these different surfacers to see like okay how do these effects work when i do them on bricks that are covered in this stuff first so let's do some experiments here [Music] so i've got a raw piece as my control group here and you can see my expert hammering skills there must be something wrong with this hammer i don't know it's i should return it clearly doesn't work as intended but that does remind me here is a different technique that is i don't know why i didn't show this earlier you can just put something else where you want the ding to be and then hit that other thing and that makes it much i can't easier it [Music] we have got a winner what do they win though absolutely nothing [Music] all right so i'm gonna do you know a hammer bash a couple little stabby stabs a slash let's do a hand-drawn crack all right so these have dried now i'm gonna see what it's like with the mod podge you can see it gives it a little bit of a shield there it certainly makes cutting more difficult the little impression i give with the rock is a little more rounded and drawing in cracks afterwards not nearly as nice these are the main ones i was interested in trying so this is spackling on one and sheetrock on the other spackling is a little softer and more flexible [Music] you can see you can slice through it like butter [Music] you can still hand draw cracks but it's a little more difficult [Music] now this stuff uh i love cracks don't get me wrong but when it falls off like that it seems very unuseful it'd be great for this sort of thing where you're filling in gaps you know on a building but for just going over uh brick and giving me sorry a stone and giving me the look i want yeah you can see it's um it's tricky business let's see what i'm pressing does i'm pretty sure it's just going to break stuff away and yeah more or less i'm trying to press hard enough to actually get a crack in there and it's tricky i will be showing a way to get a good effect with this shortly but first let me show you this other trick i really like where you slice in a few lines from the side i try to vary the depth as i go so that there's again variety yay variety and then you can just peel away bits and pieces the top layer you start you know you pull back the most and then you progressively pull back less and less as you go further back you can use tweezers you can use the old stab and flick technique and obviously the more layers you've cut into the back the deeper you can go with this [Music] but it gives a really cool sort of shale look now i want to add a little pocket down on this side so i'm just going to cut a few layers here and crack so i kind of glossed over these a bit but you can see here most of the time you've got your primary crack line that travels through the rock and then you have these little secondary and tertiary kind of hairline fractures and often the surface is displaced one way or another so i'm going to show some techniques for accomplishing that one is to simply dig your blade in at a very slight angle and then you just go in and you pop it off after you've cut that line in deep enough now my favorite way to hand do cracks like this is to use an x-acto knife a lot of people use pins and pencils and stuff like that um again because i'm going for realism uh my cracks are typically a lot thinner than sort of a cartoon version of cracks would be [Music] if i do need them thicker it's i do a v type groove you can also use the side of your blade to pull down but again you get those annoying little triangles but you can use those as prompts to work off of the main line and to add your little secondary and tertiary cracks another way you can do this is you apply pressure with one side of your blade and actually tear the foam and that gives you another sort of nice little hairline fracture and you can see the difference between really natural fracturing that happens with hammering versus hand drawn uh it's a stylistic choice really okay so here's a way to use this wire brush to get a you know a directional texture i just i have a hard time i don't particularly like this i haven't found a really a useful way to make this look like any of my reference really but i thought it was worth just showing you know messing around with it and experimenting seeing if anything useful could come from it trying to make it not look like a wooden board although to be fair a lot of ashler stone ends up i mean it does look like stone bits and it really comes down to the coloring and the context to make sure that it doesn't appear that way so because of the way these little wires abrade the surface they leave a lot of these little boogers behind which you can you know kind of plow through some of them with other tools like i'm trying to use this pin to pull some of those out trying to squash them down a little bit with my sand roller [Music] see i've been trying to recapture this effect that i got many months ago i can't remember how i did it i thought it was with that wire thing but i don't know so you know i'm trying to get closer to it just by hand carving more in that direction i find if you do enough random things if you just flail at the foam for long enough you'll usually end up with something interesting i think that's one of the reasons i've been really enjoying getting into this medium it's so versatile and rewards exploration as you can see i'm throwing almost every technique at the wall here to try to get something that i am happy with and you know what it's not far off from something like this here's my technique for utilizing sheetrock better it's basically perforate the surface and then when you apply the sheetrock it works out oh no i don't think we need to see that again all right let's see that again all right and uh back from the hospital i uh clearly i suffered from extreme blood loss and uh was was put in hospital for several months but i'm recovered now and we're going to press on so i'm experimenting with both the sheetrock and the spackling with this technique [Music] i'm trying to get this look here where you kind of have different layers that are flaking away at different speeds the thing i really like about the spackling is how sort of grungy and gritty the border is unfortunately it's hard to get it to stick down to the surface really well so another method for this layering technique is to use very thin flaps of foam you can see i've got this here i'm just pre-texturing the base and texturing the surface then i just use pva glue to stick them in place yeah this is the sort of look that i really would like to be able to recreate is the very like flat carved surface but it still has these interesting cracks and flakes and features to them all right now my spackling and sheetrock is dry let's sand these down to get the effect that i'm trying to go for and see how well it works sticking into the little holes that i gouged into the foam so the spackling is sticking pretty darn well down yeah it is not breaking or chipping off as expected but it is you know kind of rubbery and flexible and doesn't give me the nice crisp lines that i really want but let's see what it looks like after it's been painted okay and here's the sheetrock now it looks like there's a little bit of foam that got caught under the sheetrock there so that's going to leave a pretty interesting void if i pick that out [Music] but yeah let's see so if i drag a crack along there uh i am getting a little piece flaking off right but it's not like before where almost the entire thing is falling off and i can still get that mungy edge that i can get with the spackling i just have to do it by hand another thing i want to show is simply the sand method and literally you just put some glue or mod podge on there sprinkle sand on and depending on how fine your sand is it will give you different effects you know if you have grout it will be much finer and look more like a fine sandstone um this kind of rock depending on the scale that you're doing this kind of sand is gonna give you you know a different sort of conglomerate looking rock all right now i'm purposely just showing what it's like to mix more techniques together again the really fun thing about this medium is that it's just so open to exploration you can mix it up and you'll get slightly different effect depending on which order you do them in and a lot of times if you do one technique first it will give you ideas for how to layer on other techniques afterwards you know for instance i'm putting these cracks in these specific places because the foam already fractured there [Music] now i'm going to give these all a very simple finish the simplest sort of recipe that i have which is tinted black mod podge i believe this is a makeup applicator followed by a coat of kind of medium gray a black wash which is literally just black acrylic paint a lot of water a drop of dish soap and then a dry brush with a lighter color you can see how easy it is to dry you can see how easy usually dry brushing is pretty easy i go into more detail on these techniques on my previous video about making a foam mountain you can check that out here all right now i want to get into some real world applications so i've got these pillars that i'm going to be using for my shadow of the colossus diorama by the way you should subscribe so you can see how that thing is going to be coming along and uh yeah i just want to apply a whole bunch of these and see how the application works and i know this video is already longer than most people would like but i do think there's a lot of value in just kind of letting it roll i just want you to see how my thought process goes as i'm applying these different techniques let's speed the footage up just a little bit but not so much that you can't tell exactly what i'm doing and hopefully not so much that i stab my finger again can't afford another hospital stay you guys one of the things that i see in most of my reference is that a lot of the rocks are still very different from each well not very different but often different enough that you're going to see different erosional patterns pitting stains cracks etc etc so i try to treat each of the rocks a little bit different on this pillar you'll notice i didn't cover the entire thing with the aluminum foil ball i just picked some spots i tried to avoid some of the blocks i used the sand one just on that particular block etc i'm always trying to keep in mind the illusion that these are separate blocks that are stacked together i want to make sure that certain features don't travel across them unless there's a really good reason for it [Music] now i feel like the impression i was getting with that rock was kind of making the stone look smooshy instead of you know sharp and broken so now i'm adding cracks with the exacto to emphasize you know that the surface is perturbated for sure but it can be perturbated in a way that seems natural to rock versus foam you know if if it just is compressed that's not usually what rock does unless it's superheated underground and here's a great place to just flake away a little bit and get some of that really great topographical change now i've been recording the whole process for creating this diorama including the creation of these pillars using a custom made jig that i created um that'll be coming out so be sure to subscribe to see all that cool stuff and see how i am building a almost a room sized diorama it's ridiculous you guys but you know when you spent four and a half years sculpting something like this it sort of demands an equally epic backdrop that's the way i look at it [Music] all right i want to do some of my sheetrock effect up here as well [Music] so again i'm trying to confine it only to this block all right now it's mostly dry sanding it down to get that nice slatey sort of uh flat block look lunging up the edge all right we'll just skip ahead to where i'm doing kind of the final dry brushing part dry brushing across very flat even surfaces is kind of challenging i rely on a lot of smearing [Music] you might also notice that i build up my dry brushing highlights pretty slowly very subtly i just find that when i look at my reference it's unusual to see sort of bright white lines surrounding every edge i understand that to make the miniatures read the same you know as a as a not miniature it's helpful but i think it's often overdone but really you be the judge you know it's whatever looks best to you that's what you should be shooting for as lavar burton would say but you don't have to take my word for it now i'm using my wash solution which has kind of separated i have i purposely not mixed it up very much so it's mostly water on the top and more of the black paint on the bottom and so just by dipping my brush in deeper i can grab more of the dark stuff and then if i just want the pigment to run to flow i just dip it in a little bit load up my brush with mostly water and then i can kind of direct where i want the pigment to flow one thing i'm always trying to avoid is the dead giveaway of scale that the width of a drop makes so if any of the drips ends up being one drop width i almost always go in and modify it either try to make it thinner or thicker and i like to come back a couple minutes after you know i feel like it's done and then i'll usually catch a couple new things that i want to take care of especially places where the drops have terminated in place and you need to just like drag them down you need to encourage them to pretend there's more gravity than there really is for them okay now i'm going in and popping in a few more highlights again my mantra is that if every area is special no area is special so i'm trying to find the places where it makes the most sense to bring in highlights and not just highlight everything [Music] so i hope you found this useful it was certainly useful to me and i love sharing these things as i develop my skills and techniques and i'll be sharing more of this as we go oh i do want to make a quick note um my book the scarred king 2 it's out and you should buy it there's some issues and i want to apologize right now to everyone in non-english speaking countries france italy germany all of those places the book as you can see is listed as i think those are like pantyhose tights yoga pants i don't know there's this company and it lists all sorts of random things and i'm 90 sure that if you buy the book you will still get an actual physical book but yet do me a favor and complain go if you're in one of those countries and you see this listed as damon hozen or whatever please there's a little drop down and you can say hey wrong product information because they're not listening to me anyway yeah a little call to action there for you if you want to you want to help someone out please do so and also if you lack any of the tools that i used in this video heather has her crow family vis visiting right now heather's crow family is visiting right now and uh they're apparently having a grand old time she feeds them copious peanuts all day every day that's the sound of a crow tea party i think anyway uh if you want to buy any of the tools if you're lacking any of the things that i showed in the process video look down below i have links to an amazon page and if you click on those links and buy from that link i'll make a couple pennies a good way to just show a little support there if you're gonna buy the stuff anyway hey buy it through my special link as always don't forget to like and subscribe and you know follow me on the insta and the twitters and all that stuff on my discord and a huge thanks to all my beautiful patrons who have been supporting me for so long i i just i super appreciate it i can't express it enough and i'll see you guys on the next one [Music] bye [Music] go [Music] you

Channel: Josh Foreman

Views: 16,311

Keywords: sculpture, xps foam terrain, xps foam diorama, wargaming terrain, diorama, diorama building, carving, art, stone, rocks, textures, roleplay terrain, minitures, minis

Id: ettX5z4dtZk

Length: 43min 9sec (2589 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021