Enviornment texture study.

Sage

Here is some basic work I did in Photoshop. The normals were generated with the nvidia filter. Ignore the seam in since the brick and rock texture don't blend together yet. I was just testing how they would look when rendered. Let me know what you think.

Alex

Jarrod1937

it looks ok i guess. you'd probably do better just having the floor end at the bottom of the wall and using a box or something to act as a wall runner, improving the transition. that is how it is done in real life and it works.

Joseph Silverman

Your normals also look very soft and blurry. Sharp forms are what you normally see on real stone, and either way are a lot more eye catching.

CheeseOnToast

Everything has the same depth which makes it look very uniform and dull, especially the cobbles. How about adding a little more height difference here and there? I also agree with SupRore about the blurriness.

Sage

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'll be back with more.

Alex

Electro

chip away at the stones a bit too.. no stone is perfect

saturnfive

Agree with the comments above. For this kind of texture, I find much better results from modelling and baking the larger elements (borders of each stone in this case), then blending with an nvidea filtered layer for the fine details that aren't worth spending the time to model.

chinups

Hey man, The stone kinda looks a little bit like marshmallows, i agreee with electro...chip away.

Uly

Echoing the comments about the blurriness, you could fix this two ways. First, you could learn how to do the channel tweaking in Photoshop, which reportedly gives you a much nicer Normal Map. I don't have a link, so you'd have to search on it, sorry.

The second is Crazybump, which has made the rounds on the forums. Excellent app with fast, easy to tweak, and excellent results.
CrazyBump Download

The two materials themselves make for a bland combination. Cobblestone beside a brick wall is inherantly going to look repetetive and bleh next to eachother, moreso when it's in grayscale. I'd recommend practicing on a more interesting or complex surface type, or even a prop.

Judging by the light, I'm also gonna guess you're using Maya. If this is true, stop trying, find a 3rd party shader, and never try using Maya's normal setup. It's riddled with issues from not being able to support spec maps simultaneously, to having extreme rendering issues. Again, find a third party normal rendering app, or import it into a different program.