Stone walls vs wall paint - old house visualization

[tomislavn]

Hey guys, I am currently doing a pre-viz of an old house that is being reconstructed / remade as a villa for tourists over summer.

There is a lot of walls / window and door frames made out of stone, so I wondered if anyone would like to share his approach on doing this :). Here is a photo of one window frame in attachment - they are all different in real life, meaning the patterns are not really the same but similar actually (same pattern will be used for all windows in visualization though).

I thought about modeling it by hand or maybe creating some displacement maps, maybe even masking the wall then using blend material to show stones under the wall paint. Plenty of those to create so I wished to discuss it a bit before proceeding with any.

Thank you very much in advance for any feedback :)

[-Ben-Battler-]

Oh, this is a challenging one. Barely any regularity but still enough to make it look too random if you generate it procedurally. I think this is a case where moving to ZBrush or Mudbox would be advisable if you want to do it precisely. But if you say that you would use only one instance of the object, then you could model it by hand without too much effort imo.

Yes, another method would be to use displacement with some proper unwrapping..

[tomislavn]

Hey Ben, thank you very much for your constructive comment :)

I thought about going Mudbox way since I have it in on my disposal, but I am not really sure yet. Zbrush is out of the question since I don't have a license for it (yet) - but I guess they are fairly similar for this specific task.

It is more and more likely that I will go on and model it since I know that it will look quite better then using displacement - also, spending time on doing unwraps or modeling one pattern to use on windows should take about the same time I guess.

Anyway, I will see what can I come up with tonight when I get into it. I am still preparing for that part :D

[maru]

Super fast try. Here is what I did:
-created some stones using debris maker
-scattered them into a mosaic over a plane using CScatter
-added textures (used MultiMap for the stones, some AO for the concrete)
-rendered zdepth, normal map and diffuse
-made all the textures identically tileable in PS
-used zdepth as displacement (the standard 3dsmax, geometry one)
-normal map as bump map
-diffuse as diffuse
-added a white layer using LayeredMtl
-masked it with a noise map, of course this could be some hand made bitmap
This is just an idea, actually first thing I though of. It would definitely require more attention to details and hand crafting. Let me know if you find it useful, I could extend it into a more detailed guide.
Also, I was using some daily builds features.

[tomislavn]

Hey Maru, you rock my world once again (no pun intended) :D

That definitely sounds like a nice idea! I would gladly check it out if you have time to go just a little bit more into details.
I can install latest daily if needed, no problem :)