Church

[beestee]

Re: Brick

What happened to the brick generators? The ones I have don't work anymore and the links to the sites are dead. I had amce and a belcon and they both worked great. How are others generating large areas of brick and/or shingles? I used to have success with MAX's tile generator, but it must have changed in MAX 9 because the results were not good.

Create a hybrid brick material...find a brick bump map that has well defined grout. Create a mask that covers the grout area well, make sure that it will tile well also.

For the bump channel, use a mix map with the grout mask in the mix channel, use procedural maps for the brickface, use the original brick bump map for the grout.

For the diffuse channel, use a mix map with the same grout mask in the mix channel. Left at that, you have independent control over your brick and grout colors.

That mask will prove it's value further because it can also be used when adding effects such as the one that joconnell mentioned.

When working with color blends, especially high-contrast blends, keep in mind that the larger the amount of bricks in your diffuse map, the less apparent tiling will be. To keep detail at a maximum and apparent tiling at a minimum, just tile your high detail grout maps more and use a larger tiles map for brick color variation.

[glorybound]

brick

do you have an example mat?

[beestee]

Not on hand, but I will make one...just a moment.

[glorybound]

Brick

That would be much appreciated.

[pailhead]

Is there a reason for changing the position of the sun? It really lacks contrast now.

The hedge is more distracting than a lawn, even if it's a uniform noise instead of a lawn.

[beestee]

Example:

http://rapidshare.com/files/29346420...Brick.rar.html

I included 3 different scenarios of brick to simply give an idea of my approach, feel free to use these however you would like. I went ahead an made a simple grout texture in Photoshop so as not to breach any copyrights on the libraries I own.

I didn't do any test renders with them, so don't hold me to their quality, just the layout

[glorybound]

Church

I really rushed this. they needed by 8:00 am and like I said I had a sick child to tend to. I am not happy with this image and will work on it, including the sun angle. Thanks for that brick, I'll check it out.

[beestee]

After a little tweaking with one of those materials, and using joconnell's suggestion, this is what I was able to come up with:

[glorybound]

Brick

The red brick you postes worked great. The other 2 didn't work as well. I am still having issues with the roof and even if I use the red brick on the roof it still looses all detail and tiles. Maybe it is the angle. The client was happy with the image I sent several days agao, but I am not so I am going to continue to work it.

[flino2004]

nice improvement!!!
I agree with sun...it should be at one side of the camera to get more contrast...about the trees at the forground, I think they are too close to have 3d trees...I'd replace them with bitmaps in post and the grass looks a little bit pale.

Nice work!!!

[beestee]

I found something in the mats I provided that would make a big difference at the higher viewing angles. I have tweaked all of the materials, they now have a colorcorrect map on them, let me know if I need to strip the colorcorrect:

http://rapidshare.com/files/29457186...ickR1.rar.html

[glorybound]

color correct

I am using MAX 9 x64 so I can't use the color correct plug-in. Can you repost without that?

[beestee]

Minus colorcorrect:

http://rapidshare.com/files/29484797...ickR2.rar.html

[glorybound]

Church

Can you explan the textures. What do the sizes mean in the material names? How should I use these?

[beestee]

Those sizes are cube dimension for a box type UVW map, which is specific to each texture. The larger sizes are to avoid visible tiling when using the tiles map for the color variation. If you need to see in viewport the brick layout when placing your UVW, just show one of the grout masks in viewport. The colors are a little more complex in the blend, and quite a bit more complex in the flashed brick...just experiment with the colors in the diffuse channel maps to get an idea of which colors affect what.