Roof Tile Issue!

[Mathew Everett]

I have been working on getting a roof tile texture to look good for months. I stopped trying in 3ds Max and just resorted to Photoshop. whoch has worked okay over the months, But now I want to go back and try again with Max I have given a link with my current setting in max and textures I am using, any help would be appricated.

I am using Max 7.5 for this file

http://www.bfmetournaments.com/roofhelp.zip

[Morbid Angel]

Mathew, what is your issue with the roof tiling? what does not satisfy you? the example you given is pretty basic.

[Mathew Everett]

I want to achive a better looking tile in general. If you look at any of my house images all my roofs look very flat. I would like to get my mapping down so I can use a dispalcement map or a bump map properly, to get the desired effect.

[Morbid Angel]

so really, its not the tiling, its the displacement map or the text map you'r concerned with?
I think in this case, what you need is a carefully painted displacement map to represent depth of the tiles. Not just a black and white texture or the color map.

[Mathew Everett]

so your saying I just need to make a good Bump map?

[Morbid Angel]

bump map or displacement map. Generally why tiles look bad is because they look flat in texture. And since vray is filtering the textures quite a bit, and we see roofs mainly on sharp angles those tiles go blurry. With bump map you can achieve a some what good result, but you need to work with blur option in bitmap settings in max, to reduce it from 1.0 default to say 0.4 to have a more sharper bump. With displacement it doesnt matter because its real geo. I would carefully paint a displacement map based on those tiles you got, and try my luck that way.
However, Im all about practical stuff, so if neather bump, nor displacement satisfy me, i will make a basic geo for tiles. But thats not a way to go, since you can have dozen of roofs, that would be a killer.

[DaForce]

I have some displacement maps for roof tiles that im trying to find for you now.

Will post them once i can work out where they are.

[Dynedain]

there were a couple roof tile displacement maps posted here that a search might find...

they worked ok from a distance, i've ended up just modeling them and using vray proxy

[DaForce]

From one of the people at evermotion

Might help
http://www.apex.net.au/~daforce/ever...evermotion.zip

and some from this forum that someone shared ages ago.
http://www.apex.net.au/~daforce/vray...e_displace.rar

May not be perfect but certainly worth a shot

its also possible with a chunk of PS work to turn your diffuse map into a displace map. Although the diffuse map is rather average to start with and quite blurry.

[RErender]

I agree, best to model them.

[Tom B]

Why not model one tile and do a z-buffer render to make a displacement map?

[paulison]

whats faster, all modelled or displacement?

[Mathew Everett]

I thank you all for suggestions! Sorry for no posting earlier, I was out of the office yesterday sick!

I wanted to avoid modeling each roof, as I have to do 2 to 3 of these a day. and each roof layout is completely different, as modeling each roof would take allot of time. Sure the out come would look better, but I have to keep time and polys down to a minimum... being a 1 man render team

[dejaVu]

I believe the best solution has already been suggested:
Model a typical square sample of the tiles you want, and then do a Top View render from a camera and output the Z Buffer.

Then you can use this as a Displacement map.
This technique was useful on the follwoing model where modelling and placing every tile "by hand" would have driven me insane.

[Da_elf]

uuuuhhhhhh. wow!! nice one dude