texturing technique for tiles texture
polycounter lvl 11
Hi @all,
for my current scene, I need a texture of tiles with a specific pattern. As I wasn't able to find a photograph to use at least as a resource image that shows the colors and, more important, the pattern that I am looking for, I have to create the texture myself, more or less from scratch.
Unfortunately, I am very inexperienced in texturing. That's why I was hoping to get some insight from some of you how you would create such a texture.
This is the basic pattern of my tiles that are supposed to cover the bottom part of a wall. I am planning to create a texture that tiles in x-direction:
(I'm working in a higher resolution, of course.)
The question now is how I can manage to get this to look somewhat realistic.
I started by adding some color variation to the plain colors, which worked not too bad. But the main problem for me is to get the seams look ok.
I have used a photograph of tiles with a different pattern and different colors, and used the stamp tool to paint the seams from that picture into my texture.
The image I used is this one from cgtextures:
This is also more or less the style that I am going for as I use the image as another texture in my scene as well.
But painting the seams for all those tiles is quite a lot of work. However, I could of course reuse a smaller unit of tiles and repeat it.
I haven't sculpted anything to bake some helping or detailing textures because my computer is too slow to handle any sculpting...
But before I continue working with a technique that is maybe totally unuseful, I would like to know how you would approach such a texture. Any hints and tips are very appreciated!
for my current scene, I need a texture of tiles with a specific pattern. As I wasn't able to find a photograph to use at least as a resource image that shows the colors and, more important, the pattern that I am looking for, I have to create the texture myself, more or less from scratch.
Unfortunately, I am very inexperienced in texturing. That's why I was hoping to get some insight from some of you how you would create such a texture.
This is the basic pattern of my tiles that are supposed to cover the bottom part of a wall. I am planning to create a texture that tiles in x-direction:
(I'm working in a higher resolution, of course.)
The question now is how I can manage to get this to look somewhat realistic.
I started by adding some color variation to the plain colors, which worked not too bad. But the main problem for me is to get the seams look ok.
I have used a photograph of tiles with a different pattern and different colors, and used the stamp tool to paint the seams from that picture into my texture.
The image I used is this one from cgtextures:
This is also more or less the style that I am going for as I use the image as another texture in my scene as well.
But painting the seams for all those tiles is quite a lot of work. However, I could of course reuse a smaller unit of tiles and repeat it.
I haven't sculpted anything to bake some helping or detailing textures because my computer is too slow to handle any sculpting...
But before I continue working with a technique that is maybe totally unuseful, I would like to know how you would approach such a texture. Any hints and tips are very appreciated!
Replies
- What I would suggest is laying out the smallest tileable number of tiles as primitive cubes or whatever in max or maya.
- Give those edge loops to maintain their shape for smoothing, throw a flat plane in the back to act as grout.
- You could bake this out as is, or duplicate that pattern again and rotate each tile a bit so you get vairation, like the tiles were all laid perfectly.
- Bake out the Normal, AO and Height map.
- Then do the same thing you did with color variation etc... Use the AO to darken the crevices, or use it as a mask to paint dirt into those crevices, or expand the mask so it gets the edge of the tiles a bit more, and you can paint in chips or wear to them.
Basically there is alot of different stuff you can do by baking simple geometry like this, some people are great at hand painting all of this detail in, but I think this is a good compromise where you don't need to sculpt everything, but you can still generate decent height and normal maps.in just a few min i was able to take your pattern reference image nad make a clean normal map from it using ndo, and with ndo 2 you could also genrate AO and a cavity map too.
also what i did there would be very easy to rough up a bit by eraseing parts of hte edges of the stones in the hightmap before you generate the normals and overlaying noise or normals made from a photo reference.
madcow, I will try that technique again. I have tried it before with a different tile pattern, but it didn't really work out. But maybe I have more ideas on what to do now.
tristamus and passerby, yes, I will try something like ndo. However, my main problem so far is to create a decent diffuse map to use to generate a normal map. The white areas in my "concept" are tiles as well. The only part that is considerably lower than the tiles is going to be the grouting. And I would like to have some of the details in the grouting and in the surface of the tiles in my normalmap as well, so I will need to work on the diffuse map first.
I never really have much time to work on my scene, but I will post my progress here, in case you are interested
NDO can then generate AO from normals and you have a good quick starting point.
Great suggestion.
Also, I wouldn't start working on my diffuse map without having my AO and Normal map in place first, but that's just me. I feel it serves as a good guideline for where to define things in your diffuse texture. Working from Diffuse first, then going to AO and Normals seems backwards, save for other specific situations.
And in nDo2, you can easily create your Normal map by hand using shapes / curves / pen tool / whatever, right in nDo2. Then once that's done, and after you're done with painting your Diffuse, you can run your completed Diffuse through nDo2 to generate a detail normal map to overlay your first normal map.
what you could is do that, with a emboss in ndo than inverting the mask and running ndo again.
i think I will have to work on that some more...