[RESOLVED] Ceramic Tiles: Model vs. Displacement

[cjwidd]

There are a lot of professional voices on the Corona forums. I'm hoping I could get an opinion about the best method for rendering macro shots of tiles with grout (see attached). My first inclination is to actually model the tiles and jitter their position and scale, then apply a noise displacement to a planar surface to model the grout. Alternatively I could try my luck with a full texturing approach, but I'm considering about stretching and respecting the corner surfaces. Any thoughts?

[burnin]

[cjwidd]

Right, the problem with a texture approach is that it will not respect the edge cases where you can see the face and profile of the tile. I started prototyping  with a modeling approach and seems to be the best option so far.

I thought maybe Railclone has a feature for tile and grout, but I'm not sure because I have not used the plugin.

[burnin]

Then most likely mix of both techniques (modeling on edges & texturing large/flat surfaces in between) should do...

[phildavis17]

We often have to render spaces where the tile layout has been designed very specifically. The best way we've found to capture the design accurately is to model the tiles. Getting the corners, or other special circumstances, to look right using a texture based approach requires a fair amount of custom work that is not easily applied to future models. By modeling the tiles we can keep using the same tile materials regardless of the shape or layout of the tiles they are applied to.

[cjwidd]

Right, I too have resorted to modeling the tiles. It's the grout that is giving me problems; getting the grout to look natural is a challenge.