How to create tileable tree bark textures?

Artaekos_inactive

I am following Damian Lazarsky's (tea and cigarettes) 3D Motive tutorial on creating foliage for UDK. I'm creating birch trees for my environment, and just finished the texture for the branches. When he proceeds to the next chapter on creating the trees, he already has a tileable bark texture for use with his trees, and doesn't go through how to create one.

How would you guys suggest going about creating a tileable birch bark texture? My first instinct is Zbrush, since you could get the best normals that way which would be easy to blend with any subsequent maps. I'm wondering what any good alternative approaches may be

thanks..

ZacD

For smaller tree trunks, creating a tiling texture from a photo will work well enough if most cases (and generating a normal from that). If you are making a bigger tree that will be a focal point, zbrush or any sculpting software would be the best option.

Artaekos_inactive

It's a shame there's no material on the web concerning tileable tree bark creation from scratch. I guess most people just opt out to tile a photo source and generate maps from that instead.

Chase

You can also use alphas of other tree textures and combine them to create a new tree bark. Or maybe adjust brush parameters to sculpt from scratch. There's some videos out there doing that but then bark alphas are added. Though just like zac said, it all depends on whether the tree is a hero piece or filler. Might try all the aforementioned ways just so you have more tools in your arsenal

Artaekos_inactive

Alright so I quickly started from one of the planes in Zbrush and sculpted some birch bark. I'd say it's about 75% done here, enough to get the point across so far. Now, when I finish it.. my next step.. should I export a height map so I can edit in in photoshop using offset to be tileable. Then bring that height map back into Zbrush and apply it to a new subdivided plane. From there, it will be tileable in 3D, and I will be able to edit and touch up anything as long as I don't affect the the edges of the plane. Unless.. what's this scroll function I've seen people do in Zbrush with tileable sculpts, that lets them pan it across the plane? If I can do that, I don't have to worry about anything!

Lamont

Wiki-wiki-wik!!

http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironment%5Cb%29

And on the same page of this sub-forum no less...

Solutions for sculpting tileable textures (other than bricks) in zbrush 4

Artaekos_inactive

Lamont, this is a much better resource than what I found with Google. I knew about the wiki, but I didn't expect it to have so much on this specific topic. Guess I'll look there the next time. Thanks.

I'm still going to test the method I've roughed out to see how/if it works. The link you posted is interesting though, I'll try that after...

ExcessiveZero

perhaps this is the old way of doing it but I just offset the texture in photoshop paint out the seams tweak a greyscale and automatic map the norms then I cut up the uvs, branches, roots, and the main trunk into 2 parts I think and spread it across the tileable map, not the cleanest method I must admit but for the trunk I got the result I wanted



the canopy/crown on the other hand will take me a bit more doing lol.