How can i feed the procedural tiles shader with different textures ?

[ingoerik]

As said above, i want to give the VRay tiles shader three different tiles it should display randomly. Works with Modo procedurals but not with VRay procedurals, any ideas ?

[vladimir.nedev]

Can you show your Modo setup for this ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[ingoerik]

Hi Vladimir, thanks for your answer. If you add a Modo Crackle Shader (enhance:Modo textures - Organic) for example you find in that panel Output controls called output regions, one backround layer and one foreground layer. If you go into the schematic view you can add a texture to each of the layers with alpha channels. Very basic but it works and is in several procedural shaders.

It would be nice if one can use Vrays multi-sub texture to add several textures to one texture input so it randomly displays them, at the moment you need different meshes or mesh parts to work with it.

[vladimir.nedev]

Hi Vladimir, thanks for your answer. If you add a Modo Crackle Shader (enhance:Modo textures - Organic) for example you find in that panel Output controls called output regions, one backround layer and one foreground layer. If you go into the schematic view you can add a texture to each of the layers with alpha channels. Very basic but it works and is in several procedural shaders.

If you drag and drop a V-Ray texture in the Schematic, some of its channels will be automatically added to the Schematic as well.
These are the channels that you can connect textures to, for example for the V-Ray Tiles texture - color mortar and color tiles are added there.
So you can do the same thing in V-Ray.

It would be nice if one can use Vrays multi-sub texture to add several textures to one texture input so it randomly displays them

You can do this already.

at the moment you need different meshes or mesh parts to work with it.

I am guessing you want to have a different texture randomly per tile ?
This is a feature of the Bercon Tile texture in 3ds Max, but we don't have it in our V-Ray Bercon Tile implementation unfortunately.

I am still not sure how you would setup this with Modo ?

You can sort of do it using 2 V-Ray tile textures by utilizing the "fade variance" parameter, this will basically give you a random value you can use in a texture switch.
But it's not as powerful as the Bercon Tile in 3ds Max, I think.
You have to match the UV mapping on both tile textures, and tinker with the mapping on the random textures as well.

I am attaching an example scene and screen-shot.
The scene uses textures from the Modo standard content.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[ingoerik]

Thanks Vladimir, that looks great and will help a lot. Isn't it possible though to develop an additional mode for the Vray multi-sub that does the same thing, for every texture input ? I guess that would be the most elegant version to do this kind of things since you dont have to develop it for every shader.

[ingoerik]

Okay, played a bit with it to know how it works, one should definitly NOT TOUCH the tiles color in the masking tiles shader ... AND the numbers in the horizontal and vertical count should be higher than the number of textures you want to use.

Another odd thing happens when you use the tiles shader for bump, i always get a fine black line where the bump starts, no matter what i change in the other settings. I just added an additional tiles shader and put the same settings in as the others have and switched it to bump. Any ideas what went wrong ?

[ingoerik]

Yer gotta love it. I used 3 different textures for the tile-shader color, the same 3 textures for a tile-shader for bump and a tile-shader for reflection glossiness. A different seed for each shader helps also to make it look better.

[vladimir.nedev]

Isn't it possible though to develop an additional mode for the Vray multi-sub that does the same thing, for every texture input ? I guess that would be the most elegant version to do this kind of things since you dont have to develop it for every shader.

It's not possible to just make it work for every texture. Each texture has to define a random number for the Multi-sub or texture switch to use.
In 3ds Max, only the Bercon Tile texture has this feature where a random number is assigned per each tile.

I still don't understand what's your setup for this with Modo and how it works for every shader.

Another odd thing happens when you use the tiles shader for bump, i always get a fine black line where the bump starts, no matter what i change in the other settings. I just added an additional tiles shader and put the same settings in as the others have and switched it to bump. Any ideas what went wrong ?

The tile texture creates an infinitely thin line between the mortar and the tiles, so that's why the bump mapped version looks like this.
I don't know if there is a way to fix it.
The V-Ray bercon tile texture has the option to smooth the transition and this results in a better bump I think.
But it doesn't have the variation controls.

Sorry, I can't be of more help.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[ingoerik]

Hi Vladimir, you were a great help for that problem. I made it in Modo only with textures that had the foreground/background option, not with all of them, sorry for the misunderstanding. But with that new system i finally have more options.

If the fine black line is visible i simply use a bump texture (white tile with black mortar) for the mortar bump without a gap in the tiles shader, should work fine.