In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we do some fairly intensive sculpting on creating a rock face. This tutorial makes use of a technique very similar to sketching by layering large numbers of stroke over one another to automatically create much of the detail.
All references are licensed under Creative Commons and can be here at the below links or in the included references folder:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zayzayem/4216939755/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfly/201161868/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/geogeek/1428180531/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clairity/659941944/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/geogeek/1429057694/sizes/o/
I have been making tons of these(TRYING)
thanks
awesome tut,,, i totally needed one on sculpting,,, great work man… thanks alot
well, close to half a million polygons/faces model is sure nice .
I like that. Reminds me strongly of David Revoy’s “chaos theory” conveyed through his 2D painting tutorials.
Jonathan, after scaling your plane you tell us you’ve got a 10×10 plane. It’s actually 20×20.
Just a teeny tiny correction.
I cannot believe how detailed it looks, even after just a few minutes of sculpting. A great technique, but it wouldn’t work well for other rock types. I can definitely say I’ve seen cliffs like that when I’ve been out hiking.
Great job, thanks for the tut!
what i would have liked is if you used the flatten brush. i saw a tutorial before and it gave a really nice metalic flack rock effect to the cliffs.
best…
nawabz
The current Flatten brush does not behave very well. However, the Flatten brush has been vastly improved in the GSOC Sculpt builds from JWilkins.
-Jonathan
It doesn’t seem like any of the newer builds are for the Mac OS. Would I be mistaken here? I wasn’t able to unearth anything.
exactly right i can’t find some stuff awsell!
Again a very nice Tutorial. One question:
How do you increase the intesity of the brush(what is the hotkey – You know like f for size)?
‘Shift f’ will adjust the intensity…
Great tutorial!!
I made a mountain sort of model but I also used textured brushes, and added some bump and normal maps. This is what I got (it is still sort of a work in progress):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36779538@N08/4675916632/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36779538@N08/4675294265/
wow those look pretty awesome! i really like the second one especially
Really nice tutorial.
After you are finished sculpting you just move down to the lowest sub-level and bake out a normal map and it works quite nice as a game environment
can you detail that it sounds interesting and helpful
I’m trying to install Blender 2.5 but I keep getting a message saying “The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.” when I try and start the program. Has anybody else had this problem and/or knows how to fix it? Thanks.
well one thing you can do is make sure you have blender 2.49 and also have the latest version of python( you can get to the website by installing blender 2.49b) if that doesnt work plaese reply on this site within 10 days of june 6 2010
and i will try to help some more
I’m getting that same error. I already had Blender 2.49b which is working fine. I checked and I also already had the Visual C++ 2008 redistribution package installed, but i repaired it anyways. After that, I’m still getting the error message as soon as I double-click blender.exe from the 2.5.2 directory.
You might notice on the blender.org download page for 2.5 alpha it says “Note: This version requires Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistribution Package. (about 5MB)”
Do you have this installed? I would bet on that being the problem, unless this is something that has been fixed on the GraphicALL builds as it undoubtedly will be before 2.6 is ready.
My apologies for posting again so soon, but I thought I might update you with my findings. I originally downloaded the 64-bit version, which then proceeded to give me the error message. I have since downloaded the 32-bit version, which seems to operate fine.
I’m running Windows 7 64-bit on an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz with 4GB RAM.
The side-by-side configuration problem is a Windows/LuxRender problem, doesn’t have to do with Blender integration! I downloaded the 32-bit variant on LuxRender and it started working.
Amazing! As soon as you started to sketch out the rock face I immediately started to see how it was going to come out. Nice tutorial.
excelent use of rarely used tools and a very well put together tutorial. just wondering why the thought was only of rocks/stone surfaces
wouldnt this be useful for the skin of older people, some more rought textured fabrics(like old denim), exposed worn woods/ tree trunks/branches, even to create the illusion of weld lines without the headache.
i thought about even oiled or hairsprayed hair as well.
just thoughts on future uses
What kind of tablet are you using? I was going to get a wacom bamboo pen tablet. Do you think it would be fine for this kind of sculpting and digital painting?
Does anyone now how get the panel when you press F6 on the mac?
how do i get that? is that called the oparator?
thanks
Super Tutorial,
Now I am teaching. BUT don’t stop with it again doing only the modelling, go deeper. Do the other stuff like; Bump, Spec, norm, composite the things to the end
. That’s teaching. It stops after modelling. Can you do that. I am also waiting on that Porsche tutorial, it ends somewhere with modelling number 8, but still waiting on texturing the car with all the needed steps. !!!!! 
)
Thanks for your great work
Awesome video. Very helpful for environments
If watch his RAM in the top right corner of his screen, when subdivided it the sixth time, his ram jumped up to 155.46MB. He’s got a good computer. As far as the sculpting he is extremely good at it. (Having a pen pad helps). But I wish you make another tutorial on how to texture it with texture mapping, to increase the detail.
Thanks,
Micah Lewis
I don’t know how you do it, but every new tutorial that you do is stock full of little tricks that I didn’t know existed. Thanks! I love it!
wow…i definitely have to try that, like, soon!
awesome tutorial, Jonathan, as usual
and i don’t mind your rambling, btw, it’s often interesting 
Nice, now all I need is a new processor and graphics card.
Oooo man you talk a lot. Nothing wrong about that but I’ve seen many video tutorials from you and from other peoples and you talk really much. The great thing about that is you offer really much extra-information in just one simple video and sometimes about things that has nothing to do with the video’s theme.
Can this, so intense deformed plane, be baked as a normal map on a duplicated one with no multires(or very lowres) on it? I mean if the difference between the 2 planes is too big, wont be any problems when baking like very high parts in the sculpted version (compared to the lowres one) not visible in normal map or stuff like that? I hope you understand what I mean(not to good at English). I’ve seen something in games using some techniques like that and for my general knowledge would be great to find out.
Haha, I’m glad you don’t mind me talking so much!
For the lowpoly model it would be necessary to create one that roughly emulates the shape of the high resolution model. Other wise your normal map will have difficulties baking correctly.
-Jonathan
What tablet do you use?