Paris Lucke 3D Artist Blog: Tunnels Art Direction and Stylisation

The aim of this post is to figure out the art direction I'm going to go with and here's the final result (for now) that I plan to use for the main texture, the white represents emissive which will be used as a mask for the VFX I completed in unreal engine.

I started initially with a couple basic rock sculpts and layered them to see what that might look like. I also tried out some brushes I found online and accidentally made cookies:

Orb pack: https://orb.gumroad.com/l/nOkHw
Free Stylised Rock Pack: https://80.lv/articles/free-stylized-rock-brushes/

I then started looking into making lava rock material and just my luck - there were a bunch of tutorials on how to do this in blender - small problem, I don't think you can export material maps you've made in blender. Also when I clumped the rocks together and put this material on... Looked like very unhealthy poop haha!

So I started looking away from this more realistic style towards something more stylised. My research led me to an amazing tutorial by Luc Chamerlat: https://www.artstation.com/chamerlat/blog/daPE/how-to-create-a-simple-stylised-lava-using-substance-designer

Stylised Lava by Luc Chamerlat

This served as a great base to start experimenting with what I want my rock textures to look like! Taking into account how lava tunnels form, I want it to look like there's layers of solidified lava with remnants of ebbing flow patterning the walls.

Modular Rock Pieces:

My scene will be constructed by placing modular rock pieces I've made like lego bricks as demonstrated in the example below from: https://80.lv/articles/clinton-crumpler-closed-quaters-environmen-design/

The sculpts will be a canvas for my textures. The workflow for my sculpts started with the clay build up brush to find the main shapes, I then used the trim dynamic brush to flatten it which created some cracks and then I used the trim smooth border brush, (found in the lightbox tab > trim folder) to create better edges and some more cracks. I also occasionally used the clip curve tool to create clean slices and cut into the edge of the stone wall.