Random Checker Texture

I am trying to do something like this, with just a square mesh that was subdivided a few times. I tried to make a material that does that on the base of a checker texture and displacment, but I just can’t get my head wrapped around it. Thankful for any hint.


The brick node addon should be able to do randomly colored checkers easily, which could be used to drive displacement.
I’ve done random checkers before manually, but don’t have it in front of me right now.

Thanks a lot Carl. That does the trick for me.

The standard brick texture in cycles can do this when coupled with microdisplacements.


Ahoy,
I guess Microdisplacement gives way too much geometry for that. But there’s another way to do that:

  • Create a plane and subdivide it a few times.
  • Edge Split everything to get unconnected faces (with everything selected: Mesh -> Edges -> Edge Split)
  • UV-unwrap and go into UV-Editor window
  • Select “Faces” as UV selection mode and “Individual Origins” as scaling pivot like this:


  • and scale the UV to zero like shown in the picture (you just get a bunch of points)
  • in edit mode extrude everything down to get blocks (don’t forget to recalculate normals -> Ctrl + N)
  • make a vertex group and assign the upper vertices to it (make sure only the upper ones) like this:


  • create a displacement modifier with a procedural texture of your choice
  • select “UV” as texture coordinates, “Z” as direction and your vertex group as …well… vertex group, like this:


That way you got waaay less geometry and you can further work with other modifiers and stuff.
You can play around with the displacement texture and modifier to get the result you want.

Greetings
Harle

Oh thanks Harle, I’ll definetly try that. I thought about something like this, but just didn’t find the right steps to get there.