Non-tiling shingles?

[RyanSpaulding]

Where can one find a good, non-tiling shingle? In 3 years I've never run across one yet. The one I have tiles terribly. Anyone got one they can share?

[Tommy L]

I always do them procedurally. Either with a multi-sub object randomly putting a different tile mat to each tile (if individually modeled) or overlapping mix maps with tilemap in the slots. No such thing as a non-repeating bitmap.

[Renato1]

http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jylilamm/BerconMaps.shtml

 

Check this plugin in out you can do some amazing things with the tile matetial. I am sure you can easily set up shingles with it that look non tiled.

[STRAT]

http://www.cgtextures.com/

 

anything in here you can play with?

[RyanSpaulding]

I'll have to try either that plugin or the procedural method when I get time. I'm just dealing with the tiling for right now. And couldn't find what I wanted on that texture site.

 

Thanks guys!

[SgWRX]

just the other night i took one of the standard max arch bitmaps and made it into a 9x9 image. then i darked a few individual shingles here and there. the saved jpg file was about 400kb. that seemed to work OK at least on one building i'm practicing on.

[Steve O]

Whilst it's not technically astounding I sometimes like to use the standard 'tiles' material assigned within the vray material diffuse map. You can then apply a texture within the tile material but the thing I like is that you can assign an amount of colour variance. So imagine you had a simple grey tile it will slighty adjust the tiles to different shades.

I then usually play around with a noise map to apply as a texture which doesn't tile as bad as an actual texture bitmap.

You're never going to get amazing results with a texture and bump map so the only other alternative is to individually model the roof tiles..but then I guess I'm teaching you to suck eggs with that suggestion.

 

Is there such thing as a non-tiled tile????

[Tim Nelson]

Ok, I have never rendered a project with shingles before, but now at last, the day is here. I need a nice architectural shingle for a large roof. And at the moment, I am at a little bit of a loss. I can't believe nobody's made any good texture maps for this yet.

 

I might just try a combination of a tiles map with random sizes, with a displacement map for the stepping of the shingles.

 

Ryan, what did you end up using?

[Tommy L]

I would model all the shingles, then use the Neil Blevins 'Soulscripts' tool which assigns a randon material id. Then create a multi-subobject material and create as many shingles as you have the patience for. This will give you a great non-tiling solution and is re-usable over infinite shingles

[RyanSpaulding]

Ok, I have never rendered a project with shingles before, but now at last, the day is here. I need a nice architectural shingle for a large roof. And at the moment, I am at a little bit of a loss. I can't believe nobody's made any good texture maps for this yet.

 

I might just try a combination of a tiles map with random sizes, with a displacement map for the stepping of the shingles.

 

Ryan, what did you end up using?

 

Umn, I ended up having tiling shingles due to time constraints

[Tim Nelson]

Umn, I ended up having tiling shingles due to time constraints

Haha, yeah that happens sometimes doesn't it? Well I think my solution is going to be a combination of a tiles map and displacement. It's really far enough away that it looks convincing enough, and you do not see any tiling.

 

Tom, that sounds like a great solution too, but I don't think I need to take it quite that far. I'm sure if I was a little closer I would probably find myself doing just that though. Thanks!

[Tommy L]

Haha, yeah that happens sometimes doesn't it? Well I think my solution is going to be a combination of a tiles map and displacement. It's really far enough away that it looks convincing enough, and you do not see any tiling.

 

Tom, that sounds like a great solution too, but I don't think I need to take it quite that far. I'm sure if I was a little closer I would probably find myself doing just that though. Thanks!

 

OK, but once displacement gets involved......I think its going to be much easier to just model the tiles. I mean, theyre very simple and the script I mentioned is sooooo simple. The whole thing will be surprisingly easy. And if you dont have the Soulburn scripts already, you should get them anyway.

[Tim Nelson]

Or instead of using that script, you can just make attach all the shingles together and then use the 'material by element' modifier, which probably does the same thing.

 

The displacement I'm using is pretty simple, just a gradient to get the look of overlapping shingles. I really didn't want to take the time to model all the shingles and align them to all the different pitches, etc. Though it would be a really good exercise and if I start doing more shingled roofs I will for sure do that.

[Zdravko Barisic]

I would model all the shingles, then use the Neil Blevins 'Soulscripts' tool which assigns a randon material id. Then create a multi-subobject material and create as many shingles as you have the patience for. This will give you a great non-tiling solution and is re-usable over infinite shingles

 

Can you post the settings for the mat+Object IDs?

[Tommy L]

Can you post the settings for the mat+Object IDs?

 

The material would just be a vray material with a bitmap in the diffuse slot. Make about 20 slightly different shingle maps (have the same amount Sub-object materials), use a slight falloff in the reflection channel with a low value in the highlight.

 

The object ids in the 'Assign random ID' tool would have the setting set to the same number as you have sub-objects in the material (0-20 for 20 sub-objects). This means that each shingle material is assigned to a random sub-object, so you will never get any tiling. The more sub-object materials you create, the more 'random' and varied your shingles will be.

[quizzy]

http://www.3idee.nl/3d/php/script.php?id=30

[Peter M. Gruhn]

What I do in a pinch is make two variants on the same thing and Mix them. With grass I'll just use the same grass twice but size it a little different and rotate it 37 degrees and mix with noise. With shingles/block I'll mix them with a tile.

 

The two shingles here are the same map actually just shifted 50% in each direction. This is not a good way to create randomness. But you can see it is passable (or better than nothing?) with very few shingles indeed.

 

The tile map is set to create tiles the same size and pattern as the source maps (48" x 36", 4 x 3) and then because it's easy I multiply by ten (480" x 360", 40 x 30). That will give a repeat, but a big one that topology, perspective, trees... will hide or minimalize. Anyway...

 

The tiles are set to white, the grout to black but of zero size. Then give the grout a % holes. "Oh," you might think, "50% for the perfect half and half mix of the two!" And you would appear to be wrong. I don't claim that what you see here is the perfect mix of the two, but it is 20% holes.

 

Tweak % holes and random seed until you get something you like.

 

Notice though, I forgot that the half tiles on the edges not only have to meet across one bitmap (which I did do) but they need to match across bitmaps. You can see a great seam running up the roof about 2/5ths in from the left which is caused by that.

[Tommy L]

http://www.3idee.nl/3d/php/script.php?id=30

 

Thank you Micheal.

[Matt McDonald]

http://www.3idee.nl/3d/php/script.php?id=30

 

Michiel

 

Your script looks like just the thing that I have been looking for. I downloaded it to my scripts folder (max 9 64bit) and have tried to run it via "maxscript - run script" but no luck. Any suggestions?

 

Thank you

Matt

[Tommy L]

http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm

 

Install these. The latest build has a material ID Randomizer and is suppoted by Max 9 64bit.

[Matt McDonald]

I've seen that one, thanks. Neil's script randomizes the IDs on separate objects which you can then collapse into one mesh. I'm interested in Michiels's script because it randomizes the IDs of one mesh. You see, I'm not actually interested in shingles but in plant leaves.

 

So I'm sort of trying to hijack the thread a little without hijacking the thread.

[Tommy L]

I think you can use the Neil Blevins script at sub-object level.

[Chad Warner]

there's a built in modifer called "material by element" that allows you to randomly assign material ID's to subobject elements without the use of a 3rd party script.

[Matt McDonald]

"I think you can use the Neil Blevins script at sub-object level."

 

Not that I can tell, I've messed with it a good bit.

 

"there's a built in modifer called "material by element" that allows you to randomly assign material ID's to subobject elements without the use of a 3rd party script."

 

Material by element works across the entire piece of geometry. So in my plants the trunk is ID 01 and the leaves are ID 02. I'd like to keep the trunk ID 01 and have the leaves be (for example) ID 02 - ID 05. I could detach all of the ID 01 parts, apply the modifier to the leaves and then re-attach the geometry, which wouldn't be bad, but it would be a whole lot cooler if I could do it without breaking up the geometry. It sounds to me like Michiel's script would do this.

[quizzy]

so to start the script go to the utility panel and run the maxscript from there, I only make Utility scripts (just the way I do scripting) after that you can click on the pulldown menu in the maxscript utility panel and you'll see my script..