Just wondering what the general method is to create photo-realistic bricks?

[dylanlester1]

I still haven't found a good tutorial apart from this one on Ron bekermen's site - which painstakingly creates the house brick by brick (http://www.ronenbekerman.com/making-termitary-house/)

I'm just wondering what other people's methods are on creating good looking exteriors shots with bricks. I tried using a bitmap with vray displacement - but the results weren't that great. I also tried using a normal bump map, but it still looked rather flat.

I'm considering buying the Vizpark walls and tiles plug-in - which looks quite good at achieving non-tiled textured bricks but I'm still not sure.

[Lewis Garrison]

I've always been fine using high quality bitmaps. Diffuse, bump and maybe a reflection map. Displacement depending on how rough the bricks are and how close the camera is. The maps should be large. like 20 by 40 bricks to avoid repetition. If not you just make it bigger in Photoshop.

I've yet to really need something as painstakingly creating walls brick by brick.