Landscape & Rocks
My work on the landscape began with the creation of base rock shapes to determine the scale and proportions I would need for composing the larger cliffs and terrain formations. Starting simple helped me block out the silhouette and understand how the elements would fit into the environment.
The next step was sculpting in ZBrush, where I used Boolean operations to introduce natural-looking cuts and breaks. I prepared a custom set of cutter meshes using assets from the Megascans library. With the Live Boolean tool in ZBrush, I was able to combine these cutters with my base meshes to quickly add believable detail and breakups to the rock surfaces.
This workflow gave me a good balance between control and speed, allowing me to iterate on forms while still maintaining a realistic look that fits the grounded tone of the environment.
If you’re interested in exploring this technique further, I highly recommend the Gnomon and MachineGames breakdown video on the making of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – they used a very similar approach for creating their rocks, and it’s a great reference for this kind of workflow.
