Well, how about a baby tutorial?

Here's a method I use for making a rock field.

What you will need? At least one rock model. You can make one yourself or go and collect one. If you look through the forum for a thread I posted recently, you can study the cellular textures which would make a good rock surface. A version of Carrara which has the replicator capability. A little bit of modeling capability.

-Kix

So first, let's open a blank scene and I will start with 5 rocks. At this point, each of the rocks has it's hot point centered.

-Kix

I am going to setup a system where there are a lot of rocks filling a large volume. To do that, I need a surface that also fills a large volume. To do this, I am going to build a surface in the spline modeler as shown below.

This is a surface which is a wavy line drawn in the front face and the sweep path also waved and smoothed.

-Kix

Now I will add the replicator, select the wavy surface where the objects will be replicated on, and put the five rocks into the replicator.

I then made the replicator surface 500% and turned off it's visibility.

For the render shown below, I set the backdrop to gray and the background to gray and turned on indirect lighting.

This is setup with 100 rocks and I had to reposition the camera to get something that made sense.

-Kix

The original cluster of rocks is still in the middle which you can move anywhere off camera to get them out of the way.

For fun, I changed the scale of the rocks and also increased the number of rocks to show that eventually, the shape of the original surface can be revealed.

-Kix

This is an extreme situation. However it is rather easy to get into this condition. A way to help manage the problem of revealing the replication surface, you can move the hotpoint of the replicated object to a location outside of the replicated object. Carrara will use the hotpoint as the connection to the surface. When you move the hotpoint outside of the rock, it will put the rock off the surface a little bit. Then, you should select 360 degree rotations in all three directions (x, y, z). The result is as follows.

-Kix

Then, I put in a 500% value in for the scale and moved the camera where I wanted it.

This is what I got.

-Kix

I played around with the individual rock sizes, dialed in the hotpoints again, fooled around with the number of rocks that are replicated and got this (just to show off another extreme).

-Kix

Hope that is useful!

-Kix

Hello Kixum

Thank you for sharing really appreciate it. I've had Carrara since 5 and current have the latest but have not done much with it because a bit hard to wrap my head around it and have not found enough tutorials to really get me to jump into it especially modeling tutorials so sharing your knowledge is greatly appreciated

Lobo3433

Blender Maya & 3D Forum Moderator

Renderosity Blender 3D Facebook Page

I've been thinking of building a more complete tutorial fir this subject in the rendo tutorial section.

If I do, I will post that it got made here.

-Kix

Great will look forward to it