I got tired of the usual spring rocks, so I decided to make some nice ones.
The main issue I had with them was that their UV maps and textures were screwed up, had seams everywhere, and werent interchangable.

So I deceded to make a rock that can be textured with any image, and it will be seamless. You can just slice a part out of your map texture and assign it right onto the rock and it will look perfect.

Heres how you can do it:

Open up proto-rock in wings3d, and assign it any texture:
- Go into file/import image, and select your texture.
- Then go to window/outliner
- Drag the texture you just imported onto the material labeled dodecahedron_auv (its marked with an M to show its a material)

Now you see a simple dodecahedron - already seamless.


You can now scale this in any way you desire, or rotate as you wish, but to get it more rock-like we are going to distort it. Select all the vertexes of the rock, and hit deform. You should choose crumple, then random or normal, and start deforming!



You will end up with something quite ugly, but thats no problem:


You now have two options:
A. Smooth the whole object. Select all of the faces, and right click then hit smooth.



Result:



B. Or keep the vertexes selected, and hit bevel:


Result:



Method B will result in more jagged, while method A will result smooth rocks.

Smooth will result in 60 polies, while bevel will be ~30. Both are low enough for frequent use.

Enjoy!

Groovy.

holy fajitas, how come i didnt think of this?!! nice.

Very good idea

Leads to some serious warping of your texture though doesnt it?

How is it unwrapped, is it just... not and repeats on the bottom?

Might try this with the wrecks in CA actually, they all use the same texture with just a mushy auto-UV, perhaps a technique closer to this would lead to less seams.

The warping isnt all that bad.

Look at the included proto-rock.wings file to check out the UVmaps. They are even on the screenshots. I cant really explain better than that.

Well if you're just using a texture map and it sort of doesn't matter which part gets what part of the texture you'd be fine with any mesh as you just can throw a LSCM unwrapping algorithm at it and you get a perfectly unwrapped UV-map. You'd just need to select some seams where the mesh gets "cut open"...

Using a premapped primitive shape of course is not a bad idea but with LSCM you can unwrap any shape you want in a matter of seconds and in the given case you even won't need to spend any work in bringing the results into the shape you want like giving certain polygons the same UV space...

But thats the whole point, this didnt take more than a few clicks to UV map either, but it uses a very high percentage of the UV space, and quite efficiently at that ( the two halfs of the dodeca use the same space).
The point still is that you can slap on any image, and it will be seamless. I can UV unwrap stuff myself, its the finding and shading neighbouring edges in diff polies that kills me.

Yeah I don't want to say anything against your method but I just want to point out that you even can get good results extremly fast when not relying on a premapped primitive. Here e.g. an example with a premade bust:

Step 1: The raw mesh



Step 2: Select a loop at the bottom, hit LSCM unwrapping and you get this



Step 3: And Mr. Wooden Face is done



The only "bad" thing here is its rather suboptimal use of UV space (while being applied perfectly to the mesh) but you could optimize that within a matter of less than a minute plus this shape was pretty complex and curvy. When doing the same for a simple rock the LSCM result you get in the first place will be much better...

So with the title of your topic being "no more UVmapping" I just wanted to point this out for those which maybe never have heard of LSCM unwrapping which nowadays any decent modelling suit offers...

Hmm, that is pretty nifty! Any free software with LSCM?

Blender.

Blender definitely has it. There also was some sort of external tool which grabbed Blender's LSCM code and turned it into a standalone unwrapping tool. I think it was called "Roadkill"...

Wings might offer that too but I'm not sure of it...

Beherith's method will actually work a lot better than you'd think if you are using normalmaps, because then the distortions will be largely hidden by the normalmap.

front or top projection (snap image under tools in wings3d) ftw

Just try unwrapping something in an app without this after being used to the perfect simplicity and ease-of-use that you get in Blender.


Pure god-awful nightmare.