So I’m rather new to architectural rendering, (not new to Blender however). I’ve discovered that one does not find enough appropriate textures for a single floor tile, and yet the internet is flooded with seamless textures of floor tiles. So I was wondering , is it bad to use a texture of several tiles , uv map it on a plane and then add a normal map to it? Does it reduce the quality of the image? Should I continue modelling individual tiles? Could anyone tell me the pros and cons of using a tile texture vs using a single texture on modelled tiles? By tile texture I mean like the one below :
I tend to use procedurals for tile generation, i.e. the brick shader addon. I actually use my own setup, but the principle is the same; each tile gets a random color which can be used for any randomization you want, including UV lookup on different textures which can then be combined in random fashion (multiply this, screen that, burn the third etc). The generator itself also provides grout mask, tile curvature normals etc.
It depends on the client. Sometimes repeating patterns are completely accepted and only artists would care. Unless time is critical, I will spend time avoiding repeating patterns, even if the client probably wouldn’t care at all.
If I were to use the texture above, I would find 3 variants of it, and combine them randomly based on the brick shader addon. So upper left tile in rendered image could be combination of lower left quadrant from your image and lower right and upper right quadrant from two other textures.
