noticeable repeating pattern in tileable materials

[kevin miller]

I admit, I am no expert in 3ds max materials but I am putting in time trying to learn. I was on Ted Boardman's website and he had some pretty good tutorials on more complex material creation. My issue is I that I am struggling with setting up materials that do not show an obvious repeating pattern as you can very much see on my roof on my attached test render. Any suggestions of what I should be looking into would be greatly appreciated. Should I be doing a blend or composite material, gradiants, masking? Thanks for any help.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

You've done the most important thing - noticed that "tilable" doesn't necessarily mean "non-obvious repeat".

 

In past I've tried mixing two textures based on a noise map. Never got anything I really liked as a result. You get a hard edge jaggedy seam (a little better than a straight line, but...) or you soften that and worse get a soft area with no detail BUT a noticable repeat.

 

I've had good results with... maps that cover more area.

 

Look to making maps that don't have something that stands out the way your pale spots do. A noticable repeat is easier to live with if it looks like a quiet plaid more than a loud polka dot.

 

In my current project I could not get a gravel that I liked except for this one shot which is just too small. So I put some vertical vertex noise on the ground to distort the look and change the shading. It's a lot less obvious with this low frequency overlay.

 

And I threw a procedure noise on top of it as a bump map. The noise doesn't match the actual pieces of gravel in a nice realistic way, but it adds some high frequency noise which improves the overall texture to make it look more like gravel and, perhaps more importantly, breaks up the texture repeat.

 

Throwing a non-tiling procedural into the mix like that can be a help. Try it as a composite to modify hue or something, try it as a bump map to break up the colors.

 

Now, on your roof I'm betting you are using the tile map to create shingles or tiles. That defaults to 4x4. Um... use bigger numbers. I don't know if there's much or any hit for increasing the number of tiles. Why use 4x4 when you can use 100x100?

 

If you have a repeating texture that is square but is being laid on something long and skinny, rotate it a little. 17 degrees maybe. Whatever. This gets different bands of the texture laid end to end along the object. Say you have a 100x100 piece of concrete being used to texture a curb. The curb needs only a ten pixel high section of texture. So rather than a 100 pixel repeat along the curb you can rotate the map and get effectively 1000pixels wide of texture.

 

If you do find yourself trying to mix two maps with a noise mask, or some such, see if you can scale and or rotate them differently, especially if they are structurally similar.

 

If you are worried about using textures that are too big, make sure they aren't being used too small first. Hunh? OK, look at that roof of yours. I'm not so sure it is a tile map. Let's say it's a jpeg. Did you make a nice texture in Photoshop that looks awesome? Is it 1000 pixels across? To appear in the final render at about 20 pixels. This whole render isn't 1000 pixels across. Your source jpeg at 1000 pixels could cover the whole roof with no repeat for the same expense (this pictures not 400 pixels and you only see half the roof at a time, you could use a 200 pixel source).

 

Not saying you ARE doing that, but it needed to be addressed just in case.

 

When you reuse a larger texture (like for the other roof) move the uvw gizmo so that the texture falls in different relative areas. That is, don't let both right edges of the roofs show the same part of the texture. Shift it both in u and v directions.

 

Plant a thick tree in front of the camera.

 

Sometimes you can make a few separate tiles which would look bad on their own but mixed up randomly don't look as bad. "eek, it has bold white spots!" "Yes, but they are distributed randomly about the place." "Thank you, Diceman!" I use a tile map with no grout and variation set to give a distribution of black through white tiles. Then use this as the source map in a mapped gradient ramp. Then the gradient ramp has markers set to the textures I need to mix up. See attached (textures aren't meant to illustrate your problem, but the idea should be evident).

 

That's all I can think of right now. Let me know what wasn't clear.

[kevin miller]

Wow! The most detailed response I ever received! First, I want to say thanks for taking the time to be so helpful. Time is valuable so I wanted to say thanks. As for your suggestions, I am going to play around with them today. I did not understand everything you said but that is probably me.

 

I am finding out this is a common issue and just because you purchase quality "tileable" textures, it does not mean you sttill need to tweak them. A little frustrating but I guess that is what it is. I also found an older thread over at 3D Palace on making tileable textures. I will post a link if anyone is interested but it goes through the process of taking a texture like the roof one I used and using photoshop to offset it, paint it, and basically make a larger texture to help further minimize this issue. Why the people selling the textures do not do this to create superior textures is beyond me but many things still are so no surprise there. You just keep trying to learn from others and keep going.

 

Thanks again and I will post a result if it works out any better.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

> I did not understand everything you said but that is probably me.

 

No, I knew it wasn't the best wrote.

[kevin miller]

Still, thanks for the input.

[hockley91]

Definitely use a larger canvas in your textures. Bring it into Photoshop. Make a "pattern" out of it and fill an empty canvas sized to the aspect ratio of the original texture.

 

Fill the canvas with the pattern and then rubber stamp the heck out of it to give it some variation.

 

That's one way to do it.

[kevin miller]

Yup, going to try that. I am starting to realise if you want really nice renders you need to spend some time on these textures, even if they are called "tileable".