trying to recreate this material

[kevin miller]

I need to create a texture that mimics this glazed cmu tile. My thoughts are that I want to create the texture and color pattern in photoshop create a bump map, and then save to a size that I can apply as 1 tile per pace. What I mean by that is if you take the back wall where the tile is not repeating, it would be nice to create that material at full size, or 1:1 and just apply it to the face in max. Obviously, I cannot create a high rez texture that is 25 ft x 10 ft high so how does one accomplish this? I have heard of trying to calculate pixels per foot but I do not understand how that works or is that the right way. I have heard of rendering out to texture. My thought was that this may be the way. Render out a front elevation and than use that as a guide in PS. Anyway, time is o the essence so I am hoping someone can point me to the best process for this.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

The back wall is areas of repeating tile. You could do this with a multi-sub and different material ids. "This area gets the red tile and that one gets the yellow". Then you could work up three different tiles and be good to go.

 

Blow up this image. How long is the wall? 720 pixels? How big is the wall? 20 one foot tiles? 720 / (20 * 12) = 3. Three pixels per inch. 36 pixels per foot.

 

Will your image be bigger? Use that size instead of 720.

 

You need to be careful. What's the size of the smallest detail you want to show? If the grout is 1/4" and a single pixel is 1/3" you have to antialias (and it'll look bad) your grout or just live with it fat. OR you could make the texture bigger.

 

It seems to me that it makes some sense to make the texture bigger. You won't be rendering it perfectly one pixel for one pixel, so it will be sampled, and you want to make sure the small stuff looks good. The client will come to you and say "how about if we stand here, right up close to the wall, instead. What's that like?" You don't want your answer to be "It's like bad."

 

A pixels per foot calculation is handy so you can draft things carefully in PShop. "See, a tile is 12" so that's 36 pixels..."

 

But maybe you can get away with a rougher "the image is going to be 2000 pixels, the wall takes up about half of that so 1000 pixels and I want to blow up times 2 for safety so that'll be 2000 pixels for my wall texture." If you have the geometry it's supposed to match to you can just screen grab that and paste into PShop for a guide. Scale it to suit and crop the final. Then it just becomes a matter of uvw mapping (Fit gizmo to object if you're lucky/careful).

 

Anybody have a comment on just how much bigger to make a texture? I just threw Nyquist at it and didn't think further.

[kevin miller]

I understand some of the thinking you describe. What I am struggling with understanding as an option is the pixels per foot thing. How did you come up with your pixel numbers? My thoughts were origionally like this:

 

On the element I reference above, it is the back "hidden" ticket wall I wish to deal with. Let us say this is 25 ft long x 10 feet high in the real world. If my final overall rendered image (not just this wall texture) is suppose to be 5000 pixels long by 3000 pixels high, how would I calculate the texture map size creation for that wall to be used in photoshop?

 

I am thinking I would need to figure out roughly the length (in feet?) of the overall area shown at 5000 pixels and use that to divide into the 5000 pixels? Let's say the ticket wall is 25 feet long but the over all length of the area shown in the rendering is 100 feet. 5000 pixels/ 100 feet = 50 pixels per foot. 50 pixels x 25 feet equals 1250 pixels. From this, the width of the photoshop file should be 1250 pixels wide at what dpi? When I create this texture and save it out as a texture image, we should have a perfectly fitting texture, correct? It would seem like another wahy to do this is to export the line drawing from autocad out into photoshop and create the texture that way.

[Gary Ledgerwood]

Not sure if these would you help you... Whatever you guys are talking about is way too complicated for me.

[kevin miller]

nice! Did you just create those or were these sitting in your collection? Now I need to figure out how to create may pattern. I wish I was better at material creation since I bet there is a way to do this like Gruhn was beginning to describe!

[Gary Ledgerwood]

I used the ACME brick masonry designer. It is a great tool for brick, split & smooth faced block, and apparently glazed CMU.

 

http://www.brick.com/md/index.htm

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Second props to Acme Brick.

[Tommy L]

All this talk of image size is over thinking imho. Just make it big. Bigger than it will be rendered. Unless you have a shortage of RAM, bigger is always better when it comes to textures.