Materials/Tiling/Texturing

[Gander0]

Hi

 

I'm relatively new to this area though i have been using 3D Max and photoshop for some time. What im bascially after is a good method of applying materials from photoshop.

 

I am currently working on a large scale old church made of limestone (I think.) Im used to using tiled textures, but with the scale of this building any individual facade either ends up looking completely uniform or too tiled (eg. repetition is obvious)or when zooming in close resolution is bad.

 

The way i have tryed to solve this is by using a huge file in photoshop and tiling within this file while tweaking the whole image to make individual stones different colors etc. Basically a bit of a nightmare.

 

I'd be extremely grateful for any insights on this anyone has to offer.

 

Cheers

[Diego Rosales]

A good way to avoid tiling and the hassle associated with large bitmaps is to use procedurals (brick, checker, noise) in conjunction with small bitmaps. There are values in these maps that control the level of randomness.

To some extent, it also depends on the software you are using.

It would be much better to see samples of what you're looking for, so we can help you better.

[Brian Cassil]

DarkTree is a great program for doing VERY nice procedural textures. It takes a while to get comfortable with but once you do you can create just about anything including stone textures that are perfectly seamless and have as much randomeness as you want. It's a few hundred dollars but if you do much of that kind of work its well worth it.

[Gander0]

Cheers Brian I will take a note of that for the future.

Deigo I've attached a image of what i've done so far and what i want it to look like.

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=Untitled-1_1.jpg

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=valdegrace07.jpg

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=Untitled-2.jpg

 

Above is a bit nicer close up but still some way off

 

 

I don't know much about procedural textures, but is it possible to manipulate these to suit somehow. My problem also is that as in the photo, the stone color around the windows is lighter than elsewhere.

[Diego Rosales]

Hi Gander, sorry for the late reply.

If you want to actually SEE the bricks (if you will be doing close-ups) you should use a brick map and add the color differences around the windows with a separate map created in photoshop. You could combine both (brick & dirt/imperfections) with a mix map.

Otherwise, you could use a single tileable map (bricks included) for the "modules" of your facade.

Composite maps in MAX are very powerful tools for creating what you're trying to achieve.

 

This is a quick and dirty example of a map for the module. You could do it wih every detail you wish. Creating a nice map should not be a pain, just a matter of using the right tools in PS.

 

[Gander0]

Thanks very much Diego!

 

Will give that a try....looks exactly what i need!