Dreaded Shingles...

[Aaron2004]

Hey all,

 

I'm working on a house and the first thing I need to take care of is my shingle problem. They look awful. They are flat and very fake. (I'm talking the ones on the roof...the shaker shingles on the wall need to change also, but in due time). Are there any good shingle textures out there? I'm even willing to pay a little bit so that I can end up with a nicer product. I've tried using a bump map, but that doesn't seem to cut it, either. I don't want to load it full of polys either, so I don't think I can use a displacement map. Any help?

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[ecastillor]

its sounds hard, since you left almost no options....even the best texture will look flat without some king of modelling or displacement..

[Tommy L]

What can work, if your at a lower angle, is just modelling the horizontal aspect of the tiles and letting the bitmap take care of the verticles.

[Aaron2004]

Well, I've always had very bad luck with displacement maps. I put the map on and it makes my whole roof go bonkers. Do I need to crank up a subdivide map to unfathomable heights to get a greyscale map to work correctly on it?

 

Are there any good displacement map tuts? I've heard that VRay has a nice engine for it, but I don't have that...just what comes with viz2005, like mental ray.

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[Tim Saunders]

i have posted questions here about tisplacement maps with scanline. doesn't work too hot for this kind of stuff. have you tried making your own bump map? it would be pretty easy. i would do it in 2 steps. 1-the grid or brick tiling outline of the shingles. 2- a slight gradience from the top of the shingle to the bottom. this should all be done in black and white of coarse. it should work pretty hot if you just make your bump map the same size of the bitmap, then tile it the same. and crank the bump to like 80-100.

[ishpalsingh]

search in forums

u will find a tutorial for shingles

[MegaPixel]

A Couple of suggestions first:

 

The scale of you texture looks way too big. From what I can remember of looking at a bundle of dimensional shingles at Home Depot, about 3 of those rectangles equals 3 feet. Also, it would help if you can trim off your roof with some Shingle Caps on the Hips and Ridges.

 

Are you using scanline or Light Tracer or ...? When I use advanced Lighting on my exteriors, and I want some good bump mapping on my textures, I have to turn my materials into Advanced Overide Materials and drop the Indirect Bump scale down to almost nothing (This helps avoid that strange boiling look when loking at it from an almost paralel angle). I also "Super-Sample" my shingles and use as high a resolution as possible for them. I had to purchase a few decent texture packs to acheive this.

 

Mega