asphalt shingle madness

[Mark M]

I have been pulling my hair out trying to get a decent looking asphalt roof texture to look right.

The problem I been having is that it looks nice when I render close up to the texture, but when I render further away it looks horrible.

 

Heres a close up render…..

 

And heres one further away…

 

Any suggestions on getting an asphalt shingle texture to look good? Not sure what route to go down at this point. Looking for any pointers. I'm using rhino for modeling and Maxwell or flamingo for rendering.

 

Thanks,

Mark

[manta]

If its the repeating pattern that you don't like, bring it into PS and make a very large random map from the one you have...

[Mark M]

It’s not so much the repeating I don’t like, although I know that needs to be corrected.

I don’t like how it doesn’t look like the asphalt shingles to me, for example you cant see the running bond pattern. Could it be the repeating that is causing this?

 

Thanks,

Mark

[IC]

It's too flat.

Give it a bump map.

[JamesTaylor]

if you modelled some ridges in the roof for where tiles overlap it would look much better, as Iain says its too flat at the minute.

[ronel]

i go with ic, put your materials with bump, try some renderings with adjusted percentage bumps.or edit the materials, make it bit lighter so when you render it in a far scene, it will nor get blured.

 

good luck

[MegaPixel]

I think you should correct the scale of your mapping also. It is way to large for a dimensional shingle. Throw a tape on a shingle pack from Home Depot.

 

Also, there is alot of "tonal" variation in your texture which makes tiling very evident. See what you can do with the attached image.

[Mark M]

Thanks for all the advice…

 

Dave,

Thanks for the texture map; I’m giving it a go as we speak. Funny thing is I went to home depot a few weeks ago and put a tape to a shingle. I think I see were I goofed with the size after you pointed it out.

 

I’ll post an update when it’s ready.

 

Thanks,

Mark

[edub]

it's definitely a texture map issue. look at how there seems to be a diagonal pattern, when viewing from far away. I'd tone down the contrast in the tonal range, and possibly "randomize" your tiles a little better in p-shop.

[Mark M]

Ok, heres an update. This is a render with the texture that Dave provided.

 

Do you guys think I should keep running with this?

 

Heres a link to the texture that I was trying to use, it looks very nice from up close I’m not sure why I couldn’t get it to work right. I guess the tone issues mentioned above?

 

(Dave from got3d.com was kind enough to give me this texture so I put a watermark on it)

 

texture link

[Aaron2004]

Dave from Got3D was nice enough to give you that texture for free because he got them for free.

 

http://www.certainteed.com/CertainTeed/Homeowner/Homeowner/Roofing/PhotoGallery/

 

I was pretty peeved when I bought that CD from them and came across this website 2 nights later.

[MegaPixel]

As nice as those shots on Certainteed are, they still arn't tileable - perhaps with a little work, they can be. I too purchased the Got3D Shingle package and am pretty glad I did. It's too bad that Vendors and Suppliers who have products relative to the Visualization Industry, don't take a little more time to offer good quality tileable textures of their products so that us Visual artists can use their products as a form of advertising for them.

 

Mark, I still think your scaling is waaay off (too big). Try to scale the texture so that one rectangle is no more then 12 inches. See what that does.

[Mark M]

Aaron,

Ahh I see, heres a quote from the email when Dave from got3D gave me the texture….

“I will have to create a new library of roof

textures soon. The link above was removed from Got3d because I was

informed that some of the textures came from other websites... The guy that

created them must have been a little too "creative" with the source

images... so I took it off Got3d. It's ok now, but I need to make a new

library that knocks people's socks off.”

 

Dave,

Do you have any renders with the roof texture used I could check out? I have to agree with you that it would be nice if the venders offered tileable textures for their products.

 

I know the large area of the roof the texture size needs to be adjusted more, but do you think the texture above the window and garage looks scaled to large also?

 

Thanks,

Mark

[MegaPixel]

I'm possitive;)

 

You should make it a habbit of working from reference photographs that closely resemble your project. They give you all kinds of visual ques such as material scaling, color and lighting behavior. Go to the Certainteed website once again and find a sample roof using the dimensional shingle as you do. Find an object on the house that you have a pretty good idea of what it's dimensions are, then use the scale refernce to measure the tiling of the shingle pattern. That's about all I can add.