My first Zbrush tiling texture - Looking for crits please.

JamieRIOT

LATEST UPDATE:-

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-:ORIGINAL POST:-

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Hi everyone,

I have been getting to grips with the basics of Zbrush over the last couple of months and am getting closer to finishing my first polished piece using the software. I wanted to create a tiling stone slab floor texture in Zbrush; props go out to the tutorials by Tate Mosesian and Brad Smith, they helped my out a ton!

Software used: Maya - Zbrush - NDO - Photoshop - Toolbag 2

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I showed some wip images to a few guys at work today for the first time and they gave me some good feedback and crits:
- The bricks ringed in red are nice slabs, but too unique and make tiling easy to see.
- The light variation on the slabs ringed in blue possibly stands out too much too. Again, adding to easily spotted tiling.
- Adjust sculpt to add stronger sense of height variation.



Things I still want to improve myself are:
- Possibly create a different light setup in Toolbag 2.
- Create textures that adhere to PBR workflow.
- Add more material separation; it's currently looking a little flat in my opinion.

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Here's a few more images of my process:





Thanks in advance for any advice, crits and tips you can give me!

Jamie

Ged

looks good, some more variation in height and angles of the tiles would be good, the rounded corners on all the tiles and the perfect looking cracks make it feel a bit like a cartoon environment if thats what you were going for?

jestersheepy

The stone feels a bit blobby to me, too soft and your mortar/mud is too saturated.
Subtle edge highlights would be good too.

JamieRIOT

@Ged - I was going for slightly stylised slabs (should have mentioned that at the top), but it definitely needs more height and some more angles to them.

@jestersheepy - I think I will go back in to the sculpts and polish out some of the blobby surfacing. I wanted quite rustic-feeling stone tiles, but if they are still coming across as soft I'll address that. The textures need more work for sure.

On the note of textures, any tips you have for how I can improve them and make them more suited to PBR workflow would be cool too.

Dragonar

I'm agree with jestersheepy, the stone feels blobby

JamieRIOT

@Dragonar - Thanks for your two cents, I'm going to start making some changes on this tomorrow.

JamieRIOT

...And I'm back.

With this new update I have made these changes from feedback I was given last time:
- Decreased blobby looking slabs to squarer, flatter looking ones.
- Removed broken stones that were making tiling too obvious.
- Made colour variation across slabs more subtle; again making tiling less obvious.



I'm still not getting a good sense of depth from the normal map, so that still needs tweaking I think.

Below: I tried out a version that used tesselation and a displacement map, but I was still left with horrible jaggies, even once I had tesselated the crap out of it. I think this is because the stones have vertical sides, which aren't picked up by the normal map.



And the latest textures:

Dragonar

Hey JamieRIOT ,
it's better but for me it's still a little blobby. You can see that on your normal map.
And I'm not a huge fan of the space between slabs, for me it's too big.

Of course it's my opinion

Keep it up

JamieRIOT

@Dragonar - I may go back and scale each stone up slightly tomorrow and leave it at that. Don't want to spend too much more time on this adjusting the stones again, I'm pretty happy with where it's at for my first zbrush piece.

I've had a few bits of helpful feedback on this and I think it's about time to make some final presentation shots tomorrow and move on to something new (unless there is some huge problem i need to fix on this). I'll probably create another tiling texture in zbrush, different material and maybe style too.

Jean-Pascal

Hey Jamie! I tried to create a tilable texture this week-end, and I had the exact same problem as you regarding tesselation/displacement. If you find a solution, I'd be interested to know. Keep up the good work!

JamieRIOT

@Jean-Pascal - Not 100% on this, but I think the jagginess/distortion occurs in areas where the displacement map has no information to pull from the normal map. Bevelled parts of the normal map will displace much better than perfectly vertical ones.
I could soften falloff between the stones and mortar in the displacement map, that may help.

BARDLER

Should be using a gloss/roughness map for the best results in marmoset 2

JamieRIOT

@BARDLER - I'll make that change for sure. Remove the spec from reflectivity tab, to roughness plugged into gloss. Or use both? Also, is it a good idea to put the roughness map into the alpha channel of the albedo and select A in the gloss map tab in MT2?

Thanks

StevenLove

I have recently done this type of flooring installation at my home through laminate floors denver and they have done a great work and have given a new look to my house.

FelixL

The grout is too flat. You should create a zgrabdepth heightmap of your texture, apply it as a mask to a 1:1 plane, and blur it. Then subtly apply a displacement to the plane (either in or out - experiment) and then drop the plane with the displacement to a pixol layer, which you then move along Z as needed.
You can also sculpt some nice intersections with the grout and stones.

Most of these types of textures end up looking rather flat-ish because it looks the stones are suspended perfectly perpendicular, hovering above infinitely far away grout... if you fix this, it will look nice!

JamieRIOT

@FelixL - I did a little of this, but it's obviously not near enough. I rotated some slabs, so that they were at different angles, but that's not picked up too well in the normal map either.
I'm going to look up more of these types of textures and see how others have gone about getting good height variation.
Thanks for the tips, that gives me something to work on.

Jean-Pascal

@JamieRIOT - Thanks for your input! I'll look into it.

JamieRIOT

New update on this, addressed crits on the previous version:
- Scaled tiles slightly, so the gaps in between them are slightly smaller.
- Gave the mortar plane more depth and raised it closer to the surface.
- Created textures that work with PBR correctly (hopefully).
- Used parallax in Toolbag 2 to give flat plane mesh good sense of depth.

Hopefully it's pretty much there now, maybe a couple of minor tweaks. I might crank up the saturation of the albedo slightly, as looking at it again now, it seems a touch desaturated perhaps.

Ged

that looks much nicer! decent presentation but I think you could get some slightly more exaggerated lighting on it to show off the materials and edges more, like a beauty shot .

MattyWS

The displacement adds a lot to it. The only issue I'm seeing really is the lighting between the slabs, I don't know if it's something that can be helped but there's no shadows casting and it bugs me slightly. It's mostly only noticeable on the closest ones to the camera though.

JamieRIOT

@Ged - I will have a play around with setting up different lighting inside Toolbag 2.

@MattyWS - Ah yeah, I'll see if I can get cast shadows working too.

Hopefully the next update will be the last then

AutoExit

Something happened to your screens, they are not visible.:poly122:

JamieRIOT

@AutoExit - Thanks for the heads-up. I'll have to get those sorted now.

EDIT: All fixed now Just the old image hosting website being crap.

JamieRIOT

Here we go, think I'm done with this one now (finally).

Changes made from the last update:
- Increased the albedo saturation slighty.
- Added a bit of cavity information to the reflectivity map.
- Presented texture better, with stronger lighting.