Anyone have any tips or tutorials on how to create a tileable texture for brick in Photoshop? Stone and concrete not a problem, just offset and work the seams out, but anything with a pattern in it throws me for a loop. I know I have to be making it harder than it is.
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It may look ugly, but I think it's better to have a surface that is almost identical in every part, so the final result will be more clean.
Then, if you want to add some kind of variations, you could do them by simply creating some flat poligons on the floor, and texturing them with whatever you want.
Hope I explained it well... I'm not English! ^^
Check out this thread, and specifically post made by Glynn http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1101338#post1101338
If you use UDK, you might want to check out the tutorial made by Chris Albeluhn; it's a nice way to break up the tilling
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Adding_Brick_Variation.html
Mr_Drayton - I see what you are saying. Makes perfect sense. I went through and tried to clone out anything that caught my eye.
teaandcigarettes - I actually thought about taking that route but didn't in the end. I would really like to give it a try sometime. Thanks for the link to the tutorial by Chris Albeluhn. That's a really nice tutorial.
praetus - Guides definitely helped a ton along with Skew in photoshop. Even the best photo I found to work off of, was not quite level.
TheLastDesperado - I've used the offset filter a few times for concrete, wood, asphalt, anything without a pattern. Its definitely a pain to use with patterns though but you made a very nice point about using it to find bad seams.
Anyway here's the tiled brick I came up with. Its tiled 9 times across the geo to get an idea of how well it works.
OK, Rorschach then
"The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system."
The problem you are seeing here is that there is a lot of repetitive variation and contrast in the VALUE of your bricks. This technique will help you remove that value variation, but retain the hue variation.
In Photoshop, go to Image -> Mode -> Lab Color
In your channels, notice that you now have a LIGHTNESS channel. select that channel.
Go to Filters -> Other -> High Pass and run it at something in the 2-5 radius range.
Notice that much of your Value variation is now gone!
This is useful for removing contrast, but some of that contrast is good to have and you may not want to remove it all. Experiment with keeping a copy of image that hasn't been equalized in this way, and masking contrast back in only where you want it.
This is useful for any source image that has high value contrast (for instance, if part of it is lit very differently than another part). If you've ever offset an image only to see that each edge is vastly different in value, then this is the technique to use at that point in time. You could make a value-equalized version and paint it in only over the seams you are trying to remove, for instance.
OK, I started a page. It needs pics!
Have you guys tried the patch tool/healing brush (not spot healing) for fixing seams? I've got some good results on textures with less specific patterns. I find the Clone tool is a bit redundant for me since I got the hang of the healing brush.
Healing actually looks at the values surrounding your patch and tries to blend the colour values of the patch to match what surrounds it. For getting rid of shadows when projecting skin textures its absolutely awesome
Before
After
I would have just brightened slightly that one vertical line of bricks.
@Eric; Glad to see it on the wiki. I've been busy prepping for a vacation and haven't had time to dive into the wiki stuff yet. I cleaned up the wiki article and added some example images.
@Spur; Yeah, your tiling is less noticeable but as I warned, it's easy to go too far. Taking both those versions and mixing them carefully will help you retain some of the contrast you need so it has some variation, but tone down the tiling.
Now to remember the process.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4sfcJuKrCY[/ame]
If you after that overlay some really subtle normal angle colors, I usually just do that in one layer for up and down and one for left and right and use bucket fill when I have a black/white representation of the bricks and have 10-20% opacity on the bucket, filling some stones several times will give the whole thing a pretty good variation.
As long as you've got the brick mortar/bricks in a separate layer you can pretty much do whatever you want with em easily in photoshop. And it doesn't have to take very long to get a nice layer for that.
But yeah as I said.. Castle bricks and such you can usually achieve better result from modelling/sculpting faster.
and yes, I tried it
Like perna just said though, it does seem to have a strange effect on the tone of the image.
On your example bricks, the texture gets slightly muddied, and I tried it on a concrete wall, which took on more of a sandy hue after doing lab colour, rather than concrete.
Do you have any tips for using this method, but retaining the tone/colour values as much as possible?
Also, I used a high pass value of 7.5. Lower than that, like 5, gave the image a very weird look, almost like an ugly filter.
*For bricks, or similarly pattern based materials, crop the texture so that the vertical edges of the texture run through the centre and between bricks.
*Drag down a bunch of guides to find any details that are crooked or bent.
*Use the warp transform tool to straighten them. Skew and distort can also sometimes be handy, but generally Warp is your best friend when it comes to this kind of thing.
*duplicate your texture to a new layer.
*Offset the original. It can occasionally be helpful to avoid putting seams right in the centre of the image to help avoid that overly tiled look, though for the most part it doesn't matter greatly.
*Add a layer mask to your duplicated image and invert it so the image becomes invisible. If you're not familiar with layer masks, get learning. They're invaluable when creating textures or any other image in Photoshop.
*Making sure you have your layer mask selected, use a white brush to paint out the seams. You don't want straight, consistent lines here. A more chaotic shape should help hide the seam. Adding a few random splodges here and there can also help. Just switch back and forth between black and white adding and subtracting from your mask until you have something that looks nice and tiles well.
That about covers it. From there you can throw another 5-6 layers of overlays on top, add some adjustment layers for good measure and you'll have something that looks like a half decent brick texture.
Also, many times with things like bricks, I will start off with a much larger image than what I want to crop down to. So if I crop out 1/2 of the original image, I might use the other half for the invisible layers. That way when I paint white to reveal that image, and cover a seam, I'm not just revealing the same details that are a few pixels over.
Lastly, as Jack said, use various brushes to cover seams with. If it's something splotchy & rough, like rock, use a splotchy brush. If it's something like bricks, that you need to get to tile right, use a harder brush with a little bit of a rough edge on it.
This was done in five minutes so it's a little sloppy, but you get the idea