Anyone have any tips or tutorials on how to create a tileable texture for brick in Photoshop? Stone and concrete not a problem, just offset and work the seams out, but anything with a pattern in it throws me for a loop. I know I have to be making it harder than it is.

you just need to try and make sure the grout lines connect with eachother. The biggest part of getting it to work is making sure you crop the texture correctly and remove all perspective/lens distortion. Then you can do things like offset and carefully clone stamp all the grout lines together. Also, manually placing bricks along seams works well.

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I have one working pretty good now. I've had to move a few single bricks around to eliminate some of the pattern but it seems like with tiled brick you are always going to have somewhat of a pattern.

This kind of patterns usually pop out when you have some uneven and noticeable areas in the texture, like chopped bricks, holes, heavier shadows, imprecise placing of some details, etc.
It may look ugly, but I think it's better to have a surface that is almost identical in every part, so the final result will be more clean.
Then, if you want to add some kind of variations, you could do them by simply creating some flat poligons on the floor, and texturing them with whatever you want.

Hope I explained it well... I'm not English! ^^

I believe that the best way to do this sort of textures is to sculpt/model some highpoly; it usually gives you much better results and actually takes less time than fiddling around with the clone tool.

Check out this thread, and specifically post made by Glynn http://www.polycount.com/forum/showt...38#post1101338

If you use UDK, you might want to check out the tutorial made by Chris Albeluhn; it's a nice way to break up the tilling

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Add...Variation.html

One of the things I can recommend in photoshop is the use of guides. Make sure your brick is level before trying to work on it. Also duplicate layers with alpha masks can be easier than the clone tool and they're not as destructive.

A godsend in Photoshop for helping making textures tilable is the Offset filter, under Filter>Other. This will let you see the seems in your textures a lot easier, then a lot of the time it can simply be a case of clone brushing. It's a bit harder with bricks mind, as they are in a set pattern, but the Offset will still help you see where you need to change things.

Been on vacation for a few days now I'm back and feeling all refreshed! Anyway here's a tiled brick texture I came up with for a project I'm working on. Its not spectacular but not too terribly bad either. Mostly just a pattern in the shade of the brick. It looks like when they constructed the building, the brick mason didn't mix bricks from different pallets, so you see a slight variation in color. I guess that's ok as its something that happens in real life for sure. I think a dirt or grunge map would probably help hide the pattern. So anyway I just did this the old fashioned way by copying one side and flipping it over to the other. The first few tries had some really wild patterns in them but I finally eliminated most of them by moving a few bricks around.

Mr_Drayton - I see what you are saying. Makes perfect sense. I went through and tried to clone out anything that caught my eye.

teaandcigarettes - I actually thought about taking that route but didn't in the end. I would really like to give it a try sometime. Thanks for the link to the tutorial by Chris Albeluhn. That's a really nice tutorial.

praetus - Guides definitely helped a ton along with Skew in photoshop. Even the best photo I found to work off of, was not quite level.

TheLastDesperado - I've used the offset filter a few times for concrete, wood, asphalt, anything without a pattern. Its definitely a pain to use with patterns though but you made a very nice point about using it to find bad seams.

Anyway here's the tiled brick I came up with. Its tiled 9 times across the geo to get an idea of how well it works.

The problem with mirroring is you get a recognizable "butterfly" effect down the middle of the seam. If you blur your eyes a little, you can see dark lines running down the tiled texture. Other than that it looks good.

"butterfly" effect might be a bad term cause its a name of a completely different effect, but I tend to view it was more of a diamond or symmetry effect.

Oh you mean time travel.

OK, Rorschach then

Not time travel, even though that movie featured time traveling, it was more about the effects of changing small but key events in his life.

"The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system."

attention whore

fuck it zac- its an art forum we all knew what it was referring to.

Here's a neat trick.

The problem you are seeing here is that there is a lot of repetitive variation and contrast in the VALUE of your bricks. This technique will help you remove that value variation, but retain the hue variation.



In Photoshop, go to Image -> Mode -> Lab Color

In your channels, notice that you now have a LIGHTNESS channel. select that channel.

Go to Filters -> Other -> High Pass and run it at something in the 2-5 radius range.

Notice that much of your Value variation is now gone!


This is useful for removing contrast, but some of that contrast is good to have and you may not want to remove it all. Experiment with keeping a copy of image that hasn't been equalized in this way, and masking contrast back in only where you want it.

This is useful for any source image that has high value contrast (for instance, if part of it is lit very differently than another part). If you've ever offset an image only to see that each edge is vastly different in value, then this is the technique to use at that point in time. You could make a value-equalized version and paint it in only over the seams you are trying to remove, for instance.

Cool tip! You should add this to the wiki.

OK, I started a page. It needs pics!

oh wow. now i'll never have to mess with gradients again to get rid of value differences. thanks for sharing that one.

epic tip cman2k !!

Have you guys tried the patch tool/healing brush (not spot healing) for fixing seams? I've got some good results on textures with less specific patterns. I find the Clone tool is a bit redundant for me since I got the hang of the healing brush.

Healing actually looks at the values surrounding your patch and tries to blend the colour values of the patch to match what surrounds it. For getting rid of shadows when projecting skin textures its absolutely awesome

Wow, awesome tip! It definitely helped take some of the pattern out.

Before


After

I think you've gone too far, you've lost a lot of what made the texture interesting.

I would have just brightened slightly that one vertical line of bricks.

Now he at least has a very solid base for adding grime and such though. This is an amazing tip!

Glad you guys liked the tip. I learned this from some photography dudes a while back and brought it to my texturing techniques.

@Eric; Glad to see it on the wiki. I've been busy prepping for a vacation and haven't had time to dive into the wiki stuff yet. I cleaned up the wiki article and added some example images.

@Spur; Yeah, your tiling is less noticeable but as I warned, it's easy to go too far. Taking both those versions and mixing them carefully will help you retain some of the contrast you need so it has some variation, but tone down the tiling.

Nice job on the page!

That was a great tip, cman2k, and you are right that the values depends on the texture, did a test on a metal texture with streaks of rust and light/dark from left/right and using your values its pretty much just ends up with a boring plain metal without all the interesting details, but adjusting it to 20-30 value I lost the gradient but preserved the details. Really great, been using the gradient method and often not satisfied because it often ruins it.
Now to remember the process. ;)

mudbox is sometimes helpful during texture creation...

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