Suggest methods to create a textured road

[chrisjacks21]

They're great - didn't realise Ambient Light did these.

Second that, Ambient Light ones are really good.

[flino2004]

Do you paint the streaks cracks etc on the "mix amount" map then? Or is it painted on the asphalt map? I'm confised on which layer you paint it. I'm geussing the ashpalt layer, otherwise how do you get the detail of the cracks on a low ress mix map?

the crack map it's a mask, so you can copy the material that you have for the asphalt but darker with the crack mask and bump, they could be in different mapping channel to control the scale if you need it.

[dlparisi]

First off, stop calling it a "Crack Map". Somehow that just sounds wrong.

But Flino's right, it's just a mask so all of the detail in the cracks and dirt just comes from the darker asphalt map. This isn't a perfect solution to create the most amazing road texture ever, but it is a quick way to get some decent detail in a road over very large surfaces. IMO, it's just enough detail that someone looking at the images won't notice the street at all (due to too much detail or too little) but will focus on the buildings, which is what they're paying me for anyways.

[zoranm]

I use the same method of painting a big map to cover the whole area as the base map and then overlay with composite map in multiply mode ( I don't use mix-map for this). Good thing is that maps for cracs, dirt etc.. can all be in greyscale or even index mode (less memory consumption). If you need to colour grade it just add another layer in composit map and change mode to colour. For close up shots I always do more detail set up with road surface, lines displaced, glossed etc...

Great news is that now in Vray 2 you can fragment those big maps so not to clog your memory.

zoran

[tricky]

Great news is that now in Vray 2 you can fragment those big maps so not to clog your memory.

Sounds interesting. I've not seen anything about this...

[stevesideas]

Sounds interesting. I've not seen anything about this...

Are you talking about vraybitmap Zoranm ?

[flino2004]

I remembered this vismaster collection for asphalt and other materials
http://commerce.vismasters.com/catal...ol-2_4466.aspx

[zoranm]

Are you talking about vraybitmap Zoranm ?

No. I'm talking about Vray-exr. Do a search on youtube or vray site for new features for vray2.0. Jimmy is explaining how to convert bitmas into tiled EXRs, so Vray loads only fragment of the image visible in a particular camera view, thus preserving memory and speeding up render.

regards

Zoran

[instinct]

Mind you that it is primarily conserving memory. That MIGHT speed up rendering, usually that would slow down rendering tho (because VRay is constantly loading/unloading data from disc instead of accessing the readily loaded bitmap in memory). This is similar to proxies.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Neilg]

You can just make the masks in photoshop and do the materials in a blend mat using different uv channels. great thing about this method is if you've got an autocad plan, you can use solid hatching and print to pdf to make all the masks.
you still need to use huge maps for the masks so the white lines and fine details dont get pixellated but you can get away with a lot more.

[super gnu]

problem with tiled exrs, is they dont support 8 bit colour. in my tests, replacing a huge jpeg (40 meg)with a huge tiled exr (500 meg) resulted in more ram usage, not less. and the render was definitely slower.