Best approach for custom cobblestone/paving texture?

Tom Ellis

Hey all.

I'm looking for some tips/advice on creating a nice cobblestone/paving texture for a project I'm currently working on.

Obviously my first thought was the high-poly/sculpt > instance in Max > bake to a plane workflow which I think is likely the best, but I'm still having trouble creating anything I'm happy with.

There are a few considerations that need to be made too;

The texture will be used on UDK terrain, and needs to be 'paintable' as the pathway layout isn't finalised yet and will need to be flexible, may also need changing a lot later on in the project.

The pathway will be curved in most places and few straight sections. With this in mind, I can't use a 'brick' like texture or something too rectangular as the pattern will continue straight whenever the path curves and look bad.

The stones/slabs need to be fairly close in size to each other because any wild anomalies like one huge one or a specific pattern of smaller ones will obviously be noticeable immediately in the tiling.

The biggest problem I'm running into is how to set up the high poly layout. Obviously I can't make a load of unique slabs because Max will just stall and crash, but then using a few slabs instanced means piecing them together into a layout that fits and tiles is like the hardest jigsaw puzzle in the world.

I honestly never expected such a simple concept to turn out so complex!

Here's the kind of thing I'm trying to create (bad WoW shot, but couldn't find a better 'in-game' example);

http://img103.imageshack.us/f/goldshire3pk.jpg/

And here's the best attempt I've managed so far;



I know the instantly noticeable difference is that the slabs are far more rounded than in the WoW ref, but that's because it's a lot easier to piece together slabs with rounded edges than straight ones. But the resulting effect looks worse I think.

Any tips on setting this up properly to get a decent result, or your ideas for a good approach would be awesome!

Thanks

cryrid

I don't think being more rounded makes it worse, but the scale looks significantly larger compared to the rest of the terrain which seems more distant. Reducing that might be a start. Otherwise, just have a dirt layer that blends in from grass-dirt-road, with some dirt patches on the road similar to the reference (and by dirt, I'm thinking the worn-in-dirt-road kind of dirt).

Eric Chadwick

Get reference of real cobblestone, decide what pattern you like, then work on emulating that style (mixed with your own aesthetic). Reference is key when creating believable textures!

Also check out games with good cobblestone
Mytheon, Fable 3, etc.

Eric Chadwick

For the modeling part, a couple good tuts here (like Peris')
http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting#Sculpting_Tilable_Maps

Tom Ellis

Thanks guys.

It's not so much the aspect of the workflow, I'm fine with that, it's more the 'piecing together' bit when I'm creating a layout with the high poly instances. With square or rectangular blocks, it's pretty simple to create a tiling pattern of various layouts, but that will only work on paths that run at 90 degree angles to the texture layout if you see what I mean. If the path curves or runs at angles between the 90 then the block layout looks pretty bad and unrealistic as rectangular bricks tend to be laid out with the joints at 90 degree angles to the direction the path is going in. It's difficult to explain but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.

That example in the Mytheon screenshot is exactly what I want to replicate so i'll try something like that.

Eric Chadwick

This should give you some ideas.
http://wiki.polycount.com/TilingRockWallBeyer

Again though, reference is key. Your first attempt looks odd mostly because the stones have even-width lines in between them, which looks artificial. Also I would avoid using crescent-shaped stones, they're too unusual... use only convex shapes.

.morph3us

i think a full 2d workflow would be sufficient, too.
get a good looking texture (photo), get it into ps, clone away the seams amd gemerate a normal map out of it using ndo

CheeseOnToast

If you're a zbrush user, it's pretty easy to make tiling textures for things like this. You need to make use of the 2.5D canvas and its ability to wrap in all directions. Drop a 3d tool to the canvas and then hold the "@ key (if you're on a UK keyboard). You can interactively scroll the canvas around, like a live action version of photoshop's offset" filter. Keep duplicating and dropping variants of the cobblestone model (which you can scale, squash, rotate etc.) until you've filled the canvas with a perfectly tiling 2.5D pattern. Then You can fill it with the normal map material, texture it with polypaint or whatever and use the "grabdoc" function to save the results out to files.

I made a very quick example of what I mean here :

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1889770/zbrushTiling_example.mov

Tom Ellis

Awesome CheeseOnToast, thanks so much.

I was trying to figure out a way to do it in ZBrush, but didn't know the "@" thing existed so while I knew tiling textures are possible in ZBrush, I've never tried since the methods I've seen look a little cumbersome. Also, duplicating the rocks around in ZBrush means I can reshape them if necessary, something I haven't been able to do in Max which is why I've had trouble piecing together a decent layout with a set of four or so pre-sculpted blocks.

Thanks again.

CheeseOnToast

I'm not a huge fan of polypainting and grabbing textures straight from Zbrush, so I often do the above then "grabdoc" in the alpha pallette which creates a very high quality heightmap. I then create a zbrush plane, convert it to a polymesh and subdivide it a good few times. Finally, I apply the alpha as a displacement map to the plane. That gives you a nicely tiling bit of highpoly geo that you can then bake nomal maps/AO etc. etc from if you prefer to work with "standard" 3D meshes, rather than the 2.5D stuff.