Yet Another Thread about Cycles Materials

Haven’t posted in this thread for a long time. Tiles are always fun, and here is a way to randomize tiles using texture lookup where the texture is randomly positioned, scaled, rotated, and mirrored for each tile. To generate the texture coordinate, you need a tile generator that outputs per tile texture space (bricks’n’tricks and synaglow’s tiles does this) or use builtin bricks texture where you feed random black&white output into a noise generator which is then added to texture coords. In this example I’m using my own which has some other tricks, but irrelevant - I’m only showing the randomizing node group and what you can achieve when using it on one or more big textures (I used some free ones I found on poligon). Textures need to be seamless, and they can be mixed and mangled any way you see fit. The idea is to use a big texture as a lookup and basically have no tile look the same - at least at first glance. If you have to look hard to find repeats, then mission accomplished as far as I’m concerned :slight_smile:

So here is the node group that mangles the coordinates:



The Util.Math.vSign is just a math greater than, multiplied with 2, minus 1, operating on all three channels resulting in either -1 or +1 (used to mirror the scaling operation).

And here are two huge tests that shows how well it holds together when used:




The textures I’m using are very big and seamless (required). If I had a memory budget I’d probably use simplify texture size to see how much I could scale down the texture(s).

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