Textures for Commercial Surfaces?

[chipmatthews]

I've recently taken a new job in furniture visualization and often have to replicate real world commercial surfaces like specific laminates, carpets, and so on. I've been amazed and disheartened to discover that almost no manufacturers provide texture maps for visualization. There are a few exceptions. Wilson Art provides images of full laminate sheets, for example, but Formica does not. Mohawk used to provide decent texture maps of their carpets big enough to create a tiling texture from, but they seem to have stopped offering them recently. What do people in arch-viz and A&D do to solve this? Is there some secret source of which I'm not aware? Any insight would be appreciated. I'd think companies would want to make it easy for designers and viz artists to feature their wares. Am I missing something?

[Tom Sproule]

Hi Chip,

 

In general Carpet Manufacturers are the worst at giving samples. They simply don't want people to steal their designs and also copyright them as they are worried about intellectual copyright violations, I think that's what it's called. Often when doing ArchViz we recreate the carpets from anything we can find.

 

Maybe create splines for a design and have it 1mm above another spline. You can then create a texture within Max of the carpet at a high resolution and then apply it. Does that make sense?

 

You can get carpet textures by googling carpet texture or textures.com normally does some good textures.

 

Generally when creating a carpet in ArchVis, if I am not so worried about render times then I will add a displacement modifier set to 3 - 5 mm and have a noise map or cellular map on it set to a small value. This way the carpet gets random spikes like a real carpet.

 

There is a fantastic tutorial from Viscorbel on creating carpets and rugs here:

 

http://viscorbel.com/rugs-and-carpets-3ds-max-vray-tutorial/

 

But it might not really answer your question, but will give you a good idea of how we do it.

 

If you are after laminates and other items I would take a look at Arroway textures and check their PDF and see if they have anything which will help.

 

https://www.arroway-textures.ch/

 

Arroway have awesome textures and we use them fairly frequently.

 

Finally I would say to check out Siger Shaders, I use them and the guys in the office use them all the time and they save a LOT of time.

 

https://www.sigershop.eu/

 

So, what do we normally do? Normally we look at a texture and see how large we need it, do we need it to be tileable or just a small swatch. If we can get away without worrying about it tiling, like for a seat cover or chair leg, then great. That takes away the photoshop work on creating the texture to make it tileable.

 

Next we look at the texture and figure out how we can get something as close to that as possible. Obviously it depends a lot on if the object is translucent or not, how light refracts through it, how metallic or shiny it is, etc. Basically we decide how we can get something as close to that as possible and create it.

 

Normally for textures it's google a repository of textures we have created over time and resources like those I've listed above.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Tom

[CliveG]

I agree with Tom, there's no easy answer, you gotta dig.

 

My big big bugbear with this is that m'fers even when they do supply textures or the like do not necessarily give "pattern repeat" or scale information. A texture is useless unless it is accurately repeatable (I'm thinking obvious fabric / wallpaper / carpet type patterns), which means that they should supply the texture to the extents of the repeatable pattern then tell you that this is tiles at 600mm by 600mm or whatever so that you can accurately replicate how their product will look in real life. Whenever we speak to a supplier asking for information we should hassle them about this omission. We are after all trying to help them sell their stuff... it's in their interest - they want us to produce the best representation of their product!

 

Anyway in answer to your question, I now make 100% of my materials via lot's of Internet searches, subsequent photoshopping and as mentioned above - guesswork. If the project deadlines allow I will approach the m'fer but that seldom eventuates, if they have a texture it's usually searchable.

 

G'luck

[chipmatthews]

Thanks for the replies! Well three cheers for WilsonArt I guess as the only manufacturer I've seen who provides decent textures of their products. Craziness. I've been doing it the hard way by approximating in Photoshop. With tight deadlines it's hard to find the time to create new tileable textures every time, especially when they're supposed to match real products.

[SgWRX]

hey chip. check out interface carpet. it's odd to navigate around, but you get to a place where you can click on "hi res samples" and, if the carpet is a collection of planks for example, you get hi-res images of 8 variations of the planks! it's great! so you can easily put those in photoshop on different layers and rearrange them to great a larger field of carpet.

 

photoshop sucks for creating textures that you might otherwise create in 3ds max by using noise maps or "chips". i find the chips is a good map to use to create formica like surfaces. sometimes i'll do that, render out a top-down view say 10ftx10ft and save that as a bitmap to use later.

[chipmatthews]

Great tip on Interface. Thanks! I can get away with a lot procedurals and other cheats on background details, but for foreground elements, and especially our products (mainly tables) I have to be accurate. Customers expect to get a product that matches what's in the renders. Most of the laminates we use I've gotten sorted (our standard product uses mostly WisonArt thankfully) but carpets have been a problem. Interface just became my new favorite carpet maker.

[SgWRX]

update! mohawk carpet has pretty good samples now too! also, just found this thanks to a co-worker: https://www.manningtoncommercial.com/design-tools/amtico/?category=815738af-4a88-448c-9c93-5ae3914f746b&pattern=530fefbf-0f00-4e5d-9b63-3b70ad222e64&color[A]=414f4ee7-4855-4ff8-af4e-cd9c0d2ce9e3

 

although the samples i've downloaded kind of just look like the same tile over and over again

[chipmatthews]

Interesting. I couldn't get anything particularly useful out of that link but it's an interesting approach at a configurator. I also couldn't find anything new at the Mohawk sites. They used to have a section called "Render Ready Images" which was excellent, but that went away several months ago and as far as I can see is still gone.

[SgWRX]

yeah, the manningtoncommercial doesn't seem as great as i thought. like i said i did get something but it looks goofy, no easily seen pattern which is odd because it's all about patterns.

 

so for mohawk: https://www.mohawkgroup.com/detail/Carpet/7378/128417/Hustle-and-Bustle-Tile

 

i picked a color (or the default one), then over on the far right under the nifty picture they have, there's a "download assets". then under that, there's a color swatch and color swatch variations.

[chipmatthews]

Awesome, thanks! I completely missed that. They've got it pretty well hidden these days.

[SgWRX]

welcome! ha, i just found that wilsonart has some "full sheet" laminates! though i'm not sure what dimensions those sheets are. for example go there and look for high line 7970 and hover over the picture for "view full sheet". i ended up using my "full sheet" as 1ft wide by 3ft long (i rotated it in photoshop) and that looks somewhat OK in comparison to the 1 inch b 2.5inch sample i have haha. it looks like if i got bigger than 1ft by 3ft, you don't get as much detail as what's in my little tiny sample.

 

companies could be smartening up! except for daltile hahaha they are the worst!

[chipmatthews]

Yep, I mentioned WilsonArt as one of the few in my first post. They have full sheet images for everything. There's one of their sample boards with chips of all of their laminates we use hanging on the wall right next to my workstation so I check scale that way. I also tend to exaggerate the scale a bit depending on the angle to get some of the finer patterns or wood grains to read a little better. I really wish Formica would follow their example. I tried contacting them directly and got nowhere.

[SgWRX]

Yep, I mentioned WilsonArt as one of the few in my first post. They have full sheet images for everything. There's one of their sample boards with chips of all of their laminates we use hanging on the wall right next to my workstation so I check scale that way. I also tend to exaggerate the scale a bit depending on the angle to get some of the finer patterns or wood grains to read a little better. I really wish Formica would follow their example. I tried contacting them directly and got nowhere.

 

just goes to show you my memory hahaha