Sadly, female rocks are a lot more picky these days. Rocks can no longer get away with just sticking a bit of seaweed onto themselves. Nowadays, female rocks expect more. I heard that 'coral' is pretty fancy in the rock world. Maybe some of that will make the rock a heartbreaker to female rocks everywhere?
I'd just like to say now... I hate coral. Not the betting shop or the people... but the barnacle-infested lumps of God-knows-what. They are hell to create in 3DS Max... anyhoo, I started off with a simple cylinder. Up the segments to create more points to work with.
Next step was to simply fan out the bottom of the coral (Perhaps making it from a cone would have been somewhat wiser...) and 'denting' the top of it. So far, so good.
Here's where it became "fun"... 'fun' in the sense of "Lets poke our eyes with pointy objects" fun. The task was to manipulate the trunk of coral, adding other 'branches' of coral to it... all without making any of it look phallic... but still looking like coral. This wasn't as easy as it sounded...
... a little while later. I had something that looks like this. Sorta like a kicked-in cactus. No matter. It's going to small, and there's going to be a lot of it!
Just to spice things up (and make our rock look really stylish!), I decided to add some more coral. This time, it was the turn of the long, branch-like coral. To start with, I prepared myself with 5 straws, all filled with bones and ready to tweak. A few attempts taught me that it's easier to clone the first cone and make several copes before you start adding more of them...
A couple more clones, mugs of coffee and Coldplay songs later... I had something that looked a little bit like this. Actually, tell a lie... I had something that looked exactly like this. And there it is! The pieces of coral, all set to spruce up the lonely rock!
And there it is! A stunner to female rocks everywhere. Tons of coral clones, all rotated and moved into different positions... you wouldn't realise it was all the same piece of coral!
It was time to add a little bit of texture. First up was to get a nice rock texture. A bit of photoshop work would make a nice coating for the rock... or... I could just recycle the one I used for May...The seaweed also got a nice new coat. A nice shiny turquoise suited them nicely.
No, these patterns are not cut-outs from my latest jumpers knitted for me by my nan... They are in fact the textures for the coral. How were they made? In both cases, they were started off with the 'go nuts with a low opacity brush' technique I have pretty much used for every texture so far. They were hit with an 'Add Noise' filter, and finished off by sitting there and adding dots to it with the paint brush tool.
Now we're talking! There's also now a nice little gap for something that vaguely resembles a clam... hmm... perhaps a clam?Also, I'm quite glad that this rig is very, very powerful. The sheer number of bones and items in these caused any modifications to the scene to have a slight lag to it! This thing can handle the likes of Overlord and Supreme Commander... but lags on 3DS Max... how rude...
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