Tiling Photogrammetry textures

HammerB

Hey fellas!
I've been taking some photos these days inside a medieval castle in my hometown. To capture some of the walls that haven't been restored yet, to get an authentic medieval wall material.

The pics came out great but I'm facing an issue, tiling. Most tutorials online about tiling focus on a natural material (dirt, grass, etc) and don't have too much trouble on making it tileable.
But as you can see, the wall is highly irregular not only in height and width but also in depth. So I'm stuck at this part of the process.  I've tried Photoshop and I've tried the autotile inside Substance Designer, but they don't give me any usable results. Since this is one of several walls, and each material has various maps, doing it by hand I think it's out of the question. Do you have any ideas on how to approach this?

gnoop

There are few approaches:

1.  One based on  depth combine  where you  make a certain  height decrease toward the seam  and  put over  fragments  giving them a proper  depth combine and emerging trough beneath depth to hide the seam.      The seam line become  depth combine  based  . Might be still not ok  for   subjects with regular patterns.  

Could be done in Zbrush 2,5d mode {or 3d too) or just in any 3d or 2d compositing package.   in SPainter too with depth blending layers.

2.    Using Affinity photo  or Photoshop patch or content aware move tool + action recording + usual hipass/ frequency separation where necessary

3.  Same  as 2  but patching is done   by  AI tools  Alchemist or Artomatix  Art engine,   Quick and easy but not always good

In any case a height map is better be without lots of  height gradients so proper  retopo  and  smooth tesselation  before baking is a key too.   Affinity Photo has a nice easy to use frequency separation script  to weed out those gradients/height  inequalities.    A good idea to sort them out before trying to make something tile.

HammerB

Thanks, Gnoop, truth is I would like to know more about this subject, I didn't know Affinity Photo. Can you recommend me guides or tutoriales about this topic?

gnoop

Sorry, I have no tutorials  but it's  not  that complicated  really.    You don't need  Affinity Photo.   All same could be done in Photoshop or Gimp.    Just google "frequency separation" in images.  "HiPass" .  "Wavelet decompose" in Gimp 

  Yeah, Gimp did a huge step up not so long ago  , has a few tools so lacking in Photoshop .   Too bad it still doesn't have a macro recorder.

in a word  you first need to get rid of  such kind of  height  difference ,  equalize the tiling edges 

Automated     tools like Substance designer  just use blur /hipass for that  matter making kind of halos around contrast  edges .  I prefer to have some manual job involved   with proper frequency separation and  painting over low freq layer  .

Once it's done it could be just patch, heal or clone tools or whatever you prefer .  Even AI tools usually do it better on equalized  edges . 

Manual painting on low frequency  also allows to  get rid of some  extreme holes or super bright spikes   that would be obviously repeating in your normal maps  while AI  tools  sometimes just  clone them aimlessly  around or make pretty obvious hi pass  with  instantly recognizable halos.