I think the stone sculpture is about ready. While I'm considering more material edits, I'll move on to the mushrooms next so I can continue populating the scene.
There are a few different brushes recommended in the foliage class that I tried out to add a stone look to the sculpture. One of them is Trim Smooth Border. It's a great brush for adding edge damage because it can quickly flatten out any areas that you paint on.
I also tried out a variety of rock brushes to add cracks and overall texture.
Aside from the sculpt, I experimented with using a material mask to texture the sculpture. In the mask, I painted black for normal stone, red for darker stone, and green for moss. One plus of this method is that the textures are tiled, so it's easier to get a high resolution as opposed to a 0-1 map. I could also reuse this material for other stone assets. As mentioned earlier, I still would like to revisit this later to get more variation, but I think it will work for now.
Finally, one more thing that I experimented with is Nanite. It allowed me to go fairly high poly with the mesh without using too much memory. In this case, I opted to go to around 40,000 triangles with a baked normal map. All the content for the asset took up about 4.4 MB. I also imported a 150,000 triangle mesh which took up 9.6 MB. Since I felt like the former looked about as good as the higher poly one, I went with that.
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| Nanite visualization. |
Additionally, I used Nanite displacement to add some height to the mossy areas. It took me a little while to figure out. I eventually found that I needed to edit the displacement settings in the details panel. To make sure the moss only pushed the mesh out and didn't go inwards, I set the center to 0.
Next it's time for the mushrooms. They should be some more good sculpting practice, and hopefully they'll add some interesting variation to the ground.
