Creating a ruined wall in Acropora

Part 1: Creating the Wall

Acropora is one of those apps which let you stumble upon handy, new ways of doing things. For instance I found out by accident when reviewing Acropora for 3D World, that  it takes about five seconds  to generate ruined walls and other architectural bits in this application, and I found it pretty handy for game-props and quick background stuff. Here’s a quick little tutorial:

1. Open Acropora or create a new document; File>New.
2. In Voxel Tools, click Create Region, and draw a rectangle on the Primary surface, and then click Cone under Geometric modifiers. you’ll get the fastest results using the cone-modifier, but cube also works, just remember to dial down the strength setting considerably.
3. Once you’ve added the cone modifier, go to Noise modifiers, and click Volumetric noise. As you can see, instant ruined wall.

Click to enlarge

1. Now for the tweaking, if needed – the settings should be pretty default; Click Volumetric Noise in the tree under Primary Surface, and set the properties like this:

1. I like layering things so I can have fine-tune control over whatever it is I am doing, so I added another set of volumetric noise, and set it to:

   

• For variations, go to the Volumetric noise setup quad in the lower left of the screen, and start dragging the x-slider (the top one).
• Also try adding a Crust from Miscellaneous or a Hilly one from Terrain modifiers. You may want to bump up the voxel-space by clicking the Increase Voxel Densitybutton in the top bar, but too dense a mesh makes the wall look way, way too fractalised, which is an effect you want to avoid, as it isn’t pretty. Personally, I wouldn’t go higher than 256x256x256, tops.

Click to enlarge

• Export when you feel you’re done.

Part 2: Exporting and UV Mapping

I tried to extract the mesh alone via using the Extract region function under Voxels tool, but I didn’t like the way it worked, so I tidied it up by exporting as object,  ( File>Export Primary Surface) and opening it in Max by just selecting all the polys I didn’t want on the plane and deleting them.

After that I took the mesh into UVLayout, for mapping. One problem I had was unwelded and loose tris – the blue lines in the image below

Uvlayout lets you fix that by  checking the weld and clean boxes under Load Options:

I got the best mapping  results in UVLayout by just cutting along the top and sides, dividing the wall into top, front, back, leftside and rightside:

I never trust just chequered maps, so I plugged my own, below  into About UVLayout>Preferences>Map. You get it onscreen by pressing  and cycling T when you’re in the 3D view.

When you’re done with the UVmap, find two stone textures and i.e a rock or earth texture, and mix them up ’til you get a result resembling this:

Use a mix of bricks and soil to get a good, ruined texture

 - And render out: