tiles texture for morrocan atrium house
polycounter lvl 11
This is a texture that I have been working on for a scene of a morrocan riad house. I am going to show the whole scene when it is presentable 
The texture is based on an image from cgtextures which I made tilable and that I generated specular and normal maps for. The normal map is made using the GIMP normalmap plugin. All maps are 2048x2048.
The texture is supposed to be used on the floor of fairly large atrium. Do you guys think I should reduce the number of tiles in the texture to increase resolution per tile?
I am looking for critique on all aspects: The texture itself, the render, information needed for proper critique, etc... (This is my first post with own work here.)
Be honest and harsh if needed. Thats what I came here for.
walk_on_sky
The texture is based on an image from cgtextures which I made tilable and that I generated specular and normal maps for. The normal map is made using the GIMP normalmap plugin. All maps are 2048x2048.
The texture is supposed to be used on the floor of fairly large atrium. Do you guys think I should reduce the number of tiles in the texture to increase resolution per tile?
I am looking for critique on all aspects: The texture itself, the render, information needed for proper critique, etc... (This is my first post with own work here.)
Be honest and harsh if needed. Thats what I came here for.
walk_on_sky
Replies
I tried to flip the green channel in the normal map and rendered two images for comparison:
On top the normals as in my original post, underneath with the green channel inverted.
I didn't notice that the normals looked odd in my original render, but here it is very obvious...
In my opinion, the result is better on the bottom, but still, it looks a little odd in some places... What do you think?
(Maybe that is simply my bad render/lighting skills
The tiles are popping out on the bottom one...
You are both right depending on where or which direction you are looking, there are issues with the map.
I know you all have your own work to do, but I would really appreciate if someone could try to render the whole normal map on a simple plane to make sure that the problem is not the rendering. I have used Blender to render the images in this thread.
You can find the normal map in full rez here:
http://s10.postimage.org/d8hassa9z/floortiles_normals.png
This is the version I used in the renders in the first post of this thread.
Thanks you all very much for your help.
Your image did not translate to a normal map properly. I prefer to use actual geometry to bake out my maps but crazy bump, Ndo (or Ndo2), or the nvidia filter for photoshop do a decent job. I don't know any easy way to fix this using the method that you are using. I am at work, so I can't render your map out, but look at another normal map for a tileable wall/floor (you can find tons in this forum). You should have color information on all four sides of your tiles (white not being one of those colors).
To check how the normal map for those diagonal tiles has to look like in general.
I made the following object...
and generated a normal map using xnormal. It looks like this:
Notice, that two of the diagonal sides dont have any green or red hue, but only a blue tint of different brightness.
If i render a plane with this normal map in a scene with two spotlights, similar to the one used above, i get this:
Looks fine to me. I suspect more and more that the render is the problem here. Maybe the camera position is not the best, the angle was very low in the shots I posted.
Still, I would really like to see my normal map rendered in another program and by someone who knows what he/she is doing
http://www.odedge.com/forums/uof/blender_practice_005.jpg
Notice that there is color information on all four sides. While, yes, blue makes up the bulk of the normal map, there are strong variations of blue and red that indicate the surface direction (or normal) that the rendering engine is supposed to see.
If you fix your images, I can see what you are talking about.
Concerning the colours in my normal map:
The difference between my map and the example that you found is, that my tiles are arranged diagonally in the map. As far as I have understood how normal maps are generated, it is completely normal that one pair of diagonal sides in the map is only blue. Have a look at this image by Ben Cloward from the polycount wiki (http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps11.shtml):
On diagonal receives blue and red light in addition to the blue light from above, which results in a light blue (almost white) color. Bot not in a green or blue tone.
The opposing diagonal receives neither green nor red light, which results in a dark blue tone.
This is what you can see in my normal map as well.
I finally got around to render images from a steeper angle.
On top the normal map as it was in the beginning,
on the bottom with inverted green channel:
It is not very obvious, but I think the original version is right. The spotlights in this scene are on top (in the background). That means highlighted back sides of the tiles is right. But I have to figure out why this maps works so badly...
If I am right about the lights positioning your first image is correct. The edges facing the lights are receiving highlights(yellow) whereas those facing away are shaded(blue). With that said, modelling this will create stronger normals that are physically accurate.
Unfortunately, however, my laptop is much too slow to handle even the smallest mesh for sculpting. As I am not a professional or student in 3d art, a better computer hasn't been on top of my priority list. But I am planning to buy a new one sometime in the beginning of the new year.
Maybe I am going back to this material then and sculpt a proper normal map. until then, I will continue on the scene with this one.
Stay tuned (although progress might be pretty slow... there is real life, too, you know