Daniel Hatton's Architectural Visualisation Blog

3dsmax and Vray Rocks Tutorial Part 1 from Daniel Hatton on Vimeo.

This tutorial is a way to create very realistic looking rocks that can be rendered far away or for very detailed work.  After failing to find a decent tutorial online I decided to start experimenting and I came up with this. I already knew how to make decent looking rock but I needed a way of generating loads quickly for a very rocky landscape.

You need. 3dsMax, Vray, and Francois Mourlevat’s Asteroids Generator Script and this Texture which I got from CG Textures.

Step 1. Creating the Rocks

Create a Rock using Asteroids Generator Script using the settings below.

You can have a mess around with these parameters. It’s ok to delete the rock that appears when you open the script. The settings I have used are good for the gagged rocks I need. HIt the Creation Button.

Apply a Displacement Modifier to the rock. (Note that this is not Vray Displacement Modifier.) I used a strenght of 180mm. Select Shrink Wrap. Make sure you Load the Rock bitmap into the Map box as shown in the expanded view.

Click image to expand.

Apply a Turbosmooth Modifier to the stack. An Iteration of 2 is fine. I would leave it at this if you are going to be using a lot of rocks.

Click image to expand.

Step 2. The Material

Open the material editor and create a VrayMtl. Load the same bitmap we used for the Displacement Modifier into the Diffuse Slot. We are using the same bitmap for everything. You will see in the expanded view that I have dragged it down and ‘copied’ it into the Bump Map slot as well. I also added a Falloff Reflection as shown. This creates a realistic look to the rocks by adding a nice reflection to the perpendicular and parallel angles. Remember, Everything reflects!

You can take the Reflect amount down to 40 or lower and turn Refl. glossiness down to 0.5. You can mess around with these levels.

Click image to expand.

Apply the material to the rock and add a uvwmap modifier to the rocks modifier stack. Choose Box as the mapping method.

Click image to expand.

I decided at this stage to add a Vray Displacement Modifier below UVW Mapping using the settings below. Copy the Material in the Bump Slot over to the Texmap box. Amount 5.0mm, Resolution 300 and Precision 5. Nice and low for rendering.

Click image to expand.

Change the Environment slot to white if it’s not already and hit render.

Step 3. Creating new Rocks and Positioning.

Using another script called pivot placer which is part of Blur Scripts I placed the pivot to the bottom centre of the rock. Hit right mouse button on the Z: Position spinner arrows to get the rock on the floor.

Using the Asteroids Generator hit Creation to create more rocks. Each one is a different seed. Again, place the pivots of each one to the bottom center Hit right mouse button on the Z: Position spinner arrows to get the rock on the floor.

Copy the original Rock’s Modifier Stack to each new Roack as an Instance, and Apply the Rock Material to each of them as well.

You now have new rocks with exactly the same modifiers and materials applied. Make as many as you need.

If you are finding things are starting to get heavy for your PC then turn Iterations in the Turbosmooth Modifier down to 1. Essentially we want to create these rocks for distribution using Vray Mesh Export at a later stage so a higher Iteration will be fine. But for this exercise you can turn it down.

Step 4. Environment, Rendering and Camera.

So we have a number of Rocks, all different, with copied instances of the modifier stack, and the same material applied also.

Create a Vray Plane and apply a basic VrayMtl to it.

Create a VraySun and click yes to ‘add the Vray Sky to environment’.

Create a VrayPhysicalCamera and position it as shown. Click image for Camera settings.

Click image to expand for camera settings.

Here are the render settings I used.

Thanks for watching. In Part 2 we will be looking at distributing a lot of these rocks in a scene using Advanced Painter, and Vray Mesh Export.