100% procedural brick, rendered with Corona

[mattyinthesun]

I have been doing some procedural texture work with Substance Designer 5, and created this brick as a workflow test. Height, albedo, normal, gloss created using 100% procedural methods, no input textures.

[arqrenderz]

Wow :9 looks really nice, and for it to be 100% procedural it even better!!
How hard was the learning process in order to do this?? Little tutorial you have followed?

[RolandB]

Very hard to make real brick walls and you completely passed your test.
Could you explain what's the way to achieve this ?
Is there a problem with the angles (here all edges are chamfered) ?
Thanks !
Roland

[mattyinthesun]

Thanks for the kind words.

I have been using Substance Designer on and off for the last couple of years - but mainly for generating masks and things for some game projects I have been working on - some textures here and there though. There are some great videos now online for making procedural textures using Substance - you can just hunt around YouTube for "Substance Designer" - lots will come up.

The initial learning curve can be a little steep if you haven't used a node based editor at all - similar process to the node based material editor in max really - just with a lot more stuff that you can do. The biggest thing really is getting to know a good handful of useful nodes, and how to combine them with other nodes to get the effect you want. Generally of the bat a lot of what you are doing is blending noises together, warping them, and so on to get the look you want. If you use a stock noise as is, straight off, it can look procedural.

As for the rounded edges - this is just a chamfered box, I just have the rounded sections in the same UV island as the sides (if that makes sense). You will get some pinching at the corners of the rounded sections, but you don't notice it much with a texture like this.

I'm more than happy to post the substance designer file for this - if you guys are using substance. The graph is a complete mess though!!

[romullus]

I've used substance maps that ships with max and get mixed results. Sometimes it comes out pretty decent, but most of the time it's total crap. Your bricks though, looks amazing. Only if pattern could be improved...

[mirokurcik]

Substance is theoretically quite fine, but large areas are problematic.
For example, try 10x10x10m box and then you can evaluate.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/First_Unitarian_Church_of_Rochester_NW_Corner_in_snow_1214-15.jpg
https://shredworld.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/img_2065.jpg
https://spaceinmymind.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/img_2946.jpg
https://shredworld.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/img_9866.jpg

[mattyinthesun]

Honestly, the great thing about procedural is that you could make large sheets of textures relatively easily - you aren't reliant on any source image resolution.


I would tackle a brick wall like that with a blend/mix shader - I would mix in a few different procedurally generated brick textures, either based off an image or vertex paint. Over the top of that I would blend in (on another UV channel) some grime, or global wear.

The biggest gripe I have with any procedural stuff is that it can look procedural. It takes a lot of work to make it not look that way. Once you have some good grime node networks down and so forth, the process is certainly faster.

For me procedural texturing won't replace a standard texturing approach for a "hero" object. The point where it starts becoming useful however is generating textures based off geometry (using position/world space normal, cavity maps) and so on, and also for generating different texture sheets of a similar vain (different bricks, concretes etc).

[Fibonacci]

Nice, but I never seen any jigged bricks like this! _just keep in real! Today the bricks made with "machine"...so please never make this fake bricks! Before you make this fake shit, just make some study in the real life or there is the google...

Thanks!

[vkiuru]

Nice, but I never seen any jigged bricks like this! _just keep in real! Today the bricks made with "machine"...so please never make this fake bricks! Before you make this fake shit, just make some study in the real life or there is the google...

Thanks!

Not to appreciate old-fashioned handmade brickwork and to have such an aggressive response towards two images on a message board full of images is beyond me. What on earth made you think that post was worth hitting the "post" -button?

mattyinthesun: Really impressive.

[pokoy]

Great work, makes me want to finally have a look at the substance tools!

Fibonacci, what exactly triggered you to get so angry?

[arrival]

@vkiuru :right words.agree with you !

[Siger]

Here are some good examples/references: http://www.yorkhandmade.co.uk/handmade-bricks-old-clamp.aspx

[mattyinthesun]

Thanks everyone -

Fibonacci - nice to meet someone so passionate not only about bricks, but also four letter words. Those aren't "jiggles" but damage - check out the higher res image. This was taken from reference gathered from the aforementioned google, and also photos of my 120 year old chimney. Brick is one of those magical things where no two are the same. There are perfectly formed bricks, and then those that aren't. There are bricks that have seen the wars, and those that haven't.

[GestaltDesign]

Looks bloody great! Just like the local bricks in the area I grew up in.

[3dwannab]

Looks good!! Did you create the textures externally using the program or by using the dedicated map system inside max? Like this video?

Not really sure how this works under the hood. Have you any good video tutorial links?

EDIT: It's okay, got this: