Ever seen some of those weird desert rock formations?

You know.

That layered, stacked, sandy kind of rock formations. Tattooine or Arizona.

There’s a super neat trick for making those in Blender. And, for once, it’s easy. (And 100% node-free!)

That’s the topic of today’s Blend: A weird way to make rock formations.

Today’s Technique

Let’s keep this easy.

Step 1: Delete the default cube.

Step 2: Add an Icosphere

Step 3: TAB into Edit Mode

Step 4: Press A to select everything

Step 5: Squash it down with S Z.

Step 6: Press SHIFT + D and duplicate the squished sphere everywhere. Make some bigger, some smaller:

Now, TAB back into object mode. Add a Remesh modifier and adjust it like this:

And your mess will suddenly, magically, turn into rocks.

Tweak to taste. You can displace, add more resolution, texture it, whatever. There is also huge potential for building it out of nodes (which I did, successfully.)

Try it.

Now it’s time for a ninja…

Low Poly Pick

Today’s render is by Low Poly Moly.

It’s kind of awesome:

I have immense respect for anyone who can make a human face in low poly.

It’s a tough shape because it requires detail—and you want to avoid that in low poly.

The artist managed to avoid too much detail here, while still making it look like a face.

The only thing I’d change would be the mask—the polygons are too regular there. A lot of the time it’s better to avoid regular bands of polygons in low poly work.

Can't think what to blend?

Try something shiny. A beetle shell or a heap of treasure.

P.S. Just released my latest (and possibly best) fiction, read it here ↓

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