I am working on a small interior visualisation project for which I need to create a checkerboard parquet. My first intention was to use textures but I couldn’t find one that matched my needs. Thus I started working on a procedural shared instead. Ideally the shared will generate diffuse, roughness, reflection and normal maps, so that it can then easily be plugged into a PBR node for rendering with Cycles.
This is what I have come up with so far for the design of the tiled checkers. I chose to have seven tiles per checker just to get started. Basically I have used two Brick texture nodes to produce the basic tiled structure, then I have mixed them with two noise textures in order to get the wood effect right (i.e. the veining should extend along the longer side of the tile, being this either horizontal or vertical). Finally, I have combined the result with a checker texture and added BW color to the wood veining with a color ramp:
I have created a greyscale image by applying a checker texture to the two main brick texture nodes (a). I will use this down the line to boost the albedo texture (i.e. a “washed out” diffuse texture with just the colors…no shadows).
The main procedural texture node goes from two color ramps the last of which is mixed with a brown color (b): this textured will be used for both the albedo and the bump map.
Meanwhile at the bottom side of the image, two new brick texture maps are combined in order to obtain the contours texture (e). This texture is then mixed (screen) with a noise texture in order to partly delete the contours. Basically, I am trying to achieve the effect of small imperfections (gaps/raised tiles) between the tiles here and there. The result is the very bright texture (f). I now multiply this texture with a clear greyscale version of the colored texture (b), and plug the result in a bump node: that’s my normal map.
Finally with the help of two color ramps I create both the roughness and reflection textures.
I now have four texture maps and I am ready to plug them to a PBR shader.
I’ll give a completely different approach on this during the weekend hopefully, as I don’t like the brick texture one bit, and is inline with the current stuff I’m toying with. Even with upcoming gradient’ed mortar mask I think it would fall short for (my vision of) such a material (or more specifically, pattern).
It doesn’t look bad at all. It’s just not how I would approach it (due use of brick texture which has none of the controls I want).
I tried to build a quick texture around the provided pattern generator. The pattern provides “per plank” texture coordinates, which you can map either a full image to, or a small portion of an image which is then randomly offset by the random color. I’m using both a texture of the latter type as well as some procedural, just to show how it could be used.
I’m not 100% happy about the gradient output, but I think I would have to start from scratch obtaining what I now know I would like to have, as working with a grouped system is quite painful compared to everything out in the open.
Also the random colors are being used for lay inaccuracy (some for per plank, and more for per tile), but it’s not perfect and will cause black artifacting at glancing angles, even with Ace’s bump fix.
Ehm, I thought Blender 2.78 was supposed to have gradient output for the brick mortar, what happened?
