Tiling Bricks?
3 messages in this thread
Hi,
Can someone tell me how to tile the brick images on the 3DSr3 CD so they don't
look like a bunch of squares pasted together? When I tile them, the illusion
of a seamless wall of bricks is broken by the edges of each tile butting up to
the next. The docs list these files as tilable, but when they are tiled they
look so bad it is not woth the effort to use them. Am I missing something here
or is this it?
-Andy
Hi Andy,
Regarding your questions on the tiling bricks. As far as I know, a lot of the
textures on the 3DS3 CD are not really "tileable".
A true tileable texture will seamlessly join to itself on all sides. Then when
used in a rendering, the texture repeats until all geometry assigned to it is
covered. If the seamless part is working right, then the texture appears to
flow continuously.
Anyone can scan something, make a texture map, and render it. I feel a lot of
the textures on that CD are of this mindset. It doesnt seem like anyone really
"tiled" a lot of the texture samples.
To make those bricks tilable, you will need to try your hand at this
undocumented art. Most people who make tiling maps professionally, will not
give their secrets away as to how to do it either.
You may be better off taking a look at some texture libraries which already
have the tileable stuff worked out.
The Modern Medium Material Library has tiling textures, that tile seamlessly,
as well as large sampled areas, so that repeats do not look so obvious. Repeats
is a separate concept from "seamlessly tileable".
This library has been implemented in 8 and 24 bit formats on the new "Blocks
and Materials" CDROM, which also has an extensive 3D model library, with
pre-assigned materials.
There are other commercial libraries available as well.
Modern Medium can be reached at 503-343-4281
Thanks
Larry Hewitt