Drawing Thread

onyx has really cruddy rock detail, so id look to the first 2 examples since they're much better. but that said i think the rock detail in onyx is at least effective, which i think is a bit different than stuff looking "good". bit of a tangent, but effective detail differentiates structures from one another, whereas good detail does that and also gives the structure a texture that youd expect it to have. like looking at onyx, there's only that kind detail in rocks in the foreground, not so much in the background. silent's rock does this as well, but also uses detail that gives the thing a rocky texture, something which i didnt accomplish as well. i'm sure netsik is the same as silent since his detail is really clean 90% of the time, but since i dont know what track thats from i cant be as confident.
for rocks in particular tho, youve got 2 things to think about: the shape/form the rock takes, and the detail you give that rock. the first is much more important than the second since i think the latter relies on the former. to explain this better i'll give a visual example from one of ration and figured's tracks:

these rocks, despite having no detail, still look like rocks because ration or figured (dont know which, oops) understand what rocks look like. rocks are generally just one or more basic solids merged together, and when you think of them as having faces like a solid theyre much easier to understand and detail. if i were to outline the biggest rock in that photo, itd look like this:

so if you had to detail this particular rock, you should be thinking about it like a pyramid, with detail lines following that general form.
the second aspect you have to think about, the detail, will follow the form that you give a rock. youre not gonna detail that rock above like it has the surface of a sphere, for example. this is the part where i think netsik and silent excelled in those photos and where i didn't. the rocks i drew are kinda like shapes you're looking at face-on, and i didn't detail them that way, i just sorta put random rocky texture lines in different directions instead. netsik and silent drew detail in ways that both kept the structure distinct from other things in the track, as well as following the form of the rock. good way of doing this is leaving notches for yourself in a rock that you can follow and visualize a shape from. screenshots explain in detail

you got yourself a rocky shape that you then want to detail, keeping in mind the shape of the rock.

rough outline of one way you could detail from the notches

and then added detail
kinda short since i don't really know how to elaborate on the images, but the only thing you have to keep in mind when doing this process is that you're detailing the form of the rock. with this one in particular i had to remember that the right side was closer to me than the left. could've done a better job for sure, but you can at least get an idea from it.
this is of course using my style of detail, which uses black contour lines to outline a rock's shape and form, and then a combo of thick and thin gray contour and cross contour lines to detail in innards. i know mr a detailed his process somewhere in this thread, which was much better for 3d detailing, and im sure an actual artist like maple would have a much clearer process for better rocks, so keep that in mind that there's no one real way to go about this. theres just so many rocks that exist that its kinda hard to mess them up, so i think i can understand why many people's first "good" track relies heavily on rocks (and other forms of basic detail)
also paraphrased this from a dm i sent cod a few weeks ago, so sorry if it seems a bit rushed