Shale Cliff - Best way to do this

Hi everyone, in my 3D game I would like to create a cliff made from vertically aligned shale like in this picture. Before I start, I just would like to hear some of your more experienced opinions on what you think is the best way to approach this. I have Sketchup, Blender, Photoshop and Unity. Would it be best to create this as a 3D model first or do you think it would be achievable through just a texture and a normal map? If I model it, do you have any ideas how I can avoid spending hours on creating every single rock layer manually? Thank you so much everyone

 

You could look at the albedo and normal maps and whatever others for an idea of how to achieve it visually here;
https://www.textures.com/download/PBR0488/138497
As for the geometry itself, totally depends on your requirements.. low poly + texturing means larger worlds on lower-end platforms/devices etc., could go that with a procedural plane of whatever vertex density and just drag vertices around however you want for a rough shape + your texturing (there are free mesh editors around, including ProBuilder which is basically a part of the engine now). Going a step higher in quality/time investment, model your cliffs and texture however (or buy/create a higher-end script/tool). Not a full answer but hope it helps

 

Thanks, actually that was a pretty good and useful answer and I didn't know that website. Thank you so much!!

Edit: Ignore my question below, I found the answer on Google. It's gonna be modelled, not terrained

I've got another question then around the same issue. The vertical plane on which the texture is going to go is just a terrain that I pushed down, thereby creating the cliff. But now I have these tris that are super elongated, in which the textures are stretched much more than in the other areas. Do you know a way to fix this? Thank you so much

 

The way I would make a cliff like that, is to model it from scratch.