There’s an uncanny resemblance to my last Saturdoodle here… I seem to have a weakness for lonely medieval structures.
I found a random image on Saturday morning, which seems to be a 3d model for sale, and decided it could be fun to recreate. After a couple hours of modeling, the fun slowly wore off and once again I felt like I was actually working. I was however looking forward to texturing it, so I pushed on and eventually (after UV unwrapping it about 4 times) enjoyed the last part of the modeling and then stretched those old Cycles muscles I felt like I haven’t used for so long.
As you can see, the bricks are not modeled in, but in fact a displacement. Modeling them by hand would be painful, but it nearly came to that.
Instead, I created the displacement map by “modeling” each brick in 2D, tracing over a CGTextures image, and giving them a random value. A little tweaking to make sure it’s tileable, render that, blur it a bit, and you have yourself a displacement map for randomly jutting-out bricks.
Take this texture as CC-0 :) use it as you please – it goes with BrickOldRounded_0236 from CGTextures. After all, the tiny statue in the center of the front wall was sculpted by Ben Simonds and released as CC-0.
Crits and comments are welcome as always.
Hope you all had a nice relaxing weekend :)
First, let me say that I really enjoy reading your blog! Also, I have a couple of questions: Is the sand trail in front of the door modeled or did you do a displacement? And, I like that blur because it looks natural. Is it normal blur or is it some sort of channel separation? Thanks!
Hey thanks man :)
The blur is just a regular gaussian blur, I think about 3px wide. The purpose was simply to remove any aliasing and prevent harsh unnatural lines when the bricks jut out. Try using blender’s procedural brick texture as a bump map and you’ll see exactly what I mean. It looks weird, much like when you don’t bevel sharp edges, but even worse.
The footprints were just masked on with vertex colours, the texture was just one from CGTextures of some footprints in the sand :)
Awesome! I forgot to thank you! I just checked your website and realized there are a bunch of new articles. I’m so excited to read them all (specially all the new volumetric tests)
Very interesting indeed, I do use to model bricks in my scenes almost same way only bump maps in Gimp or photoshop overlayed with another layer of bump maps for cavities, this is also mixed with cloud bump. It never occurred to me to use multi level grey and brick size combinations like you did.
Ty