Just mossing around...

As the horrible wordgame and meme hints, this episode will be about painting the moss on the rocks. This doesn’t sound very interesting so far, but don’t be misjudged, it will be quite amazing actually.

Check it out by clicking read more.

This post won’t be as long as the previous one, cause this was a pretty straight forward phase.

What I really like in this editor, is that you can paint textures on top of existing ones very easily with the Vertex Paint tool . If you want to apply something like this in another 3D editor program like 3D Studio Max, it’s a whole other story.

I used the same workflow here, as when I placed the rocks, I started with the most obvious ones. There were these huge rocks in the water. They are very noticeable in the reference images, also I had shots from multiple angles on them too, so I could paint the moss every side with great accuracy.

After I finished them, I moved on to the other ones, that could be done fairly easily. This was a very fun procedure. I just had to copy the moss pattern from the reference images and then paint on the rocks. This took me only just a few hours, which doesn’t sounds that bad, if you consider there were at least 30-40 rocks that needed some moss. I spend few minutes on every one, so it wasn’t a big deal at all. But it adds so much to the atmosphere! Also, I would like you to notice how similar this moss texture compared to the movie!

Here are some pictures on the different rocks with moss on them. I think if you’re a fan, then you will instantly recognize most of these rocks and you can also know where they are in the cove. Also, I would like to note that, I wasn’t fully accurate in this stage, cause I will modify the rock texture in the near future and probably the moss will look like a mess, and in that case I have to repaint everything from scratch. But without further ado, here are the pictures:

I'm really proud how this turned out! 
You can almost imagine Toothless stalking behind those rocks. :) 

Also this one! It only lacks Hiccup's shield stuck between those two rocks. 

Also here are some images from above.

But, that's all for now. Next time, I'll make the terrain behind the rocks, and I have two reasons for that. The first, it looks very ugly in this state, and it begs to finally look decent, the second one is we're getting close to add trees into the background, so this will be a good opportunity, to finally make it to a good foundation for our trees later.

All right, see you on the next one! And of course, thanks for reading!