Tutorial: Creating a tileable texture from a normal map

[lhumphries]

Hi all. This is a tutorial I wrote for the mod I am working on (Age of Chivalry) so that I could show my workflow when it came to using photos for textures. This is not a neccessarily new technique but I consider it usefull for texture artists with no modelling experience. This is because I saw a technique similiar to it in a natural selection video showing a texture artist using an ambient occlusion map baked for him by one of the modellers (when I say I dont know how to model I mean I only know photoshop and crazybump). The majority of this tutorial is in photoshop but requires a normal map making application as well (I used crazybump). So, without furthur discussion lets move on.

Step 1.
Find a suitable reference picture. Here I downloaded a picture from cgtextures, selected 3 tiles from the picture (preferably plain and uniform shaped ones for tiling purposes) and then cropped them each individually into their own files. Then, I used crazybump to make a normal map of each so that I could get a nice looking tile texture for each easily (poor mans way of making an ambient occlusion map.

An example of the tiles and their normal map partners are seen below. To make them usable, I later desatured them to get them to a workable colour (control+shift+u).

Step 2.

Next I made an attempt at a grout texture. After putting it through crazybump to get a normal map, I desatured it in photoshop, and then used it as the background of my 2048X2048 texture so that once I have my tiles ready for arranging, they have a realistic "grout like" background rather than just a white one which would look photoshopped and produce flat spots on the final normal map.

Step 3.

Next I arranged, scaled and rotated the 3 tiles to form a rough outline as to what I wanted the wall of floor texture to look like. Then, I used the clone tool to fix hard and unrealistic edges (from the cropping tool). Also, here is where I used the clone tool to fix parts of the tiles that made them stand out. As I am sure most of you are aware, parts of a texture that make them "identifyable" or unique = not tileable (the most important thing about map textures like the way I am creating in this tutorial).

Step 4.

Then I added a simple brown colour overlay and set the blending mode of its layer to overlay.

Then I downloaded another texture from cgtextures and again, set the layer mode to overlay, and lowered the opacity to about 45% so that you could get the main features of the photo source but have it not looking like a photo source.

And the image after photo overlay.

Then I created a very noisy/grainy brown layer using filters, then overlayed it and again, lowered the opacity till the feeling was right. If this is sandstone, It needs to be gritty and look as if it could be dug into or crumble relatively easily.

And now for the final finished texture without normal or specular. Before I call a texture like this final, I like to open a new document, copy and paste in it, change the image size to 35%, define it as a pattern, open another document (about A3 in size) and then use the fill tool with pattern selected to see if it tiles.

Step 5.

Then I ran that texture through crazybump, being sure to pretty much give full strength to small details and almost none to large or medium or shape recognition sliders as they are big attributors to individuality in textures like this.

The render is in crazybump because you can tile the texture with plus or minus. This is a good tool to finally check if the texture really does tile, as well as seeing it with lighting effects added. The texture shown includes a bump map (normal) and specular (I can make specular maps much better in photoshop and I urge you all to do the same but for the simplicity of the texture I went the lazy mans option and just made it in crazbump).

Hope you learned something. I learned that using photos in the right way make good textures. Also, as I only used three tiles and then normal mapped them, there is no copyright issues. So, from now on when you see a modeller and a texture artist high fiving somewhere because of there 3d max baking abilities, dont worry, just use a technique like the one shown here and you will go far.
Thanks for reading.

[TrampledUnderfoot]

Good stuff Cheese!

This is Ekoms btw

[kinesis916]

Thanks. This should come in handy.

[lhumphries]

thanks kinesis and ekoms. Im going to post more of the stuff I have learned in an effort to kinda give back because of all the stuff I have learned here.

[urgaffel]

While this is a neat tutorial, there is a slight problem with it and that is the fact that it is repeating quite badly. It's also pretty monochrome. I'd use a lot more of the source texture personally. I'd also most likely make the normalmap after I had finished with the diffuse texture. It would allow you to turn various layers off and do some specific painting for the normalmap to get the best results.

[lhumphries]

Ok urgaffel. I will try to do the things you said and edit the post. cheers for the feedback.

[urgaffel]

No problem. One thing to keep in mind as well is the size of the bricks for the end result. A good benchmark for environment art is to use a 1024 texture for about 4m. So if that was a 512 texture for example, which translates to roughly 2m wide, each brick would be 1m long. And if you use it as a smaller brick you'll have to tile it more and thus the repeating pattern will be even more obvious