It's been awhile since I've done an update besides just pictures of places and things, so this one will be about how I do a lot of my texturing.
I dislike UV mapping... It takes a lot of time getting the seams just right, takes time texturing around a UV, and most of the time the UV is only good for one model(I can not use the texture of my giraffe on my frogs, for example)
I like to keep a lot of my texturing general purpose... break them down into smaller parts. Tile is a good example, but this kind of method can apply to a variety of things such as large concrete surfaces, placing graffiti on an surface(using multiple UV's), rocky surfaces, etc...
I also like to keep my textures small whenever possible. No bigger than 960x960 most of the time! My machine is 7 years old and was pretty good at the time but doesn't handle working on huge huge textures as nice as I'd like it too... The solution to these problems is layering textures!
Blender allows using many textures on the same material with multiple UV maps and such and it's very nice. The tile only has one UV map, but you can extend this very far is you use alpha transparent textures with multiple UV maps(you can do writing or special cracks on surfaces this way)
This is a "high poly" tile asset. If you were to do tile that would be viewed from a normal distance, you'd want to use just a flat plane, but the tile here is for a scene were you see tile from an ant-sized perspective, so it has more faces to it... This tile uses 9 faces/18 triangles. Seems little but can become ALOT when you have hundreds and hundreds of tiles in one scene!
So anyway, this is what we're looking at with a simple light setup:
First things first- we need to get some lines in our tile. To do this, we use this texture:
Simple. Black with a bit of noise with alpha transparency. This is the actual size too! Like I said I like keeping things small...
The setup is pretty normal(no pun intended!) the color is a little weaker because full on black is too much for the tile. Also the influence on the intensity and color of the specular is all the way up. The lines shouldn't have any specularity to them at all... They're rough. Which is why the normal is set all the way up. To get it roughness.
UV mapping is really important for our case, just so long as the outer faces are covered by the tile line texture...
And we get this:
But there's no actual "texture" to it yet. Here's a small concrete texture I photo-sourced from an artifact ridden picture of a drive way:
Oh man that is ugly isn't it! But the beauty of our textures doesn't matter as much as the results they produce... You don't need anything too fancy to make stone-like noise. This one seems to work very well for my purposes.
For this texture, no color at all. All that is needed for the first layer the normal influence. Also the mapping is set to global and not uv. If it were on the UV, the texture would repeat with every tile object. Global maps it... well, globally! Also, the X and Y scale are way lower. This is like the broad stroke on our material.
The result:
You can see how low resolution the stone texture is! That texture is only 320x320... very small. So to solve this, there will be two more layers of tile texture.
Layer 2:
Once again, we use this:
Like this:
This time the color data for the texture is used, but it's not set to the "mix" blend. Instead, use value. This will disregard the color of the texture and use the color of the material, but use the shading values of the textures colors... it's hard to explain but it means that the tile can be white, blue, green, red, any color just by changing the material's color. And we use the normal too, but much weaker(about a quarter of the previous' normal influence) to add a bit more variance the over all normal appearance...
One more layer of stone! Same as the last two... that ugly, horrible looking artifact ridden mess of a texture:
Here's what we do with it:
This one will repeat 3 times for every 1 of the previous layer as you can tell by the X/Y scale on the mapping panel, with very little(but still visible) normal influence.
Equals this:
The stone layers are setup. You could stop there... But the tile in my house has weird, almost handprint indentions in them. I did a simple picture of them:
Since the indention is very subtle, a lower-resolution image can be used. A rule-of-thumb I use is if it's a blurry, soft picture, it can be scaled down to a lower resolution or drawn at a lower resolution since not much detail would lost.
This is the only other thing that should be UV mapped. This texture should repeat on every tile in the same spot!
ABSOLUTELY no color influence! Just need the image for it's normal influence... And it should have a good deal influence. I also mistakenly made it black on white instead of white on black, so I checked negative to invert the influence. Otherwise, it would appear to be rising instead of falling.
The result:
Hard to tell by the lighting here, but here's the lighting for the actual scene:
It isn't exactly the effect I was going for, but I think it works well enough! If you wanted to have a bazillion polygons you'd want to make those indentions actual geometry... but that's beyond my machines capacity to render in under 40 seconds.
And a bonus! Very empty sandwich scene, but here's the tile from above:
Overall I'm satisfied with how it turned out. The nice thing is, as with all materials, it can be used
again. So it'd be easy to pop into a scene were tile is needed, tweak it a bit, and have tile unique to that scene...
This method works well for small rendering sizes like 640x480 and for 90's style renders, so your mileage may vary! Just sharing my method for getting around using small textures...
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