Procedural Brick Textures

More and more i’m convinced that the “brick” procedural was either never intended to be used, or is broken. It just is so hard to get to look anything close to correct, and to even get that far you seem to have to practicly twiddle things at random until you get lucky. Even when you do get lucky there always seems to be some artifacts. In my case either the lighting gets screwed up on the wall, or the bump somehow obliterates virtually everything in the color channel.

EDIT: It seems the lighting artifacts I had were being caused by the use of shadowmaps. Possibly there is some way to tune the shadowmaps to eliminate or reduce the problem but I don’t know about that. What I do know is that when I switch to ray-traced shadows, the problem goes away.

4 Responses to “Procedural Brick Textures”

  1. Dude, what are you talking about. Your bricks look amazing! You have to show me your technique. Keep up the good work :) .

    - Little John

    Little John said this on April 30th, 2006 at 10:17 am

  2. The artifacts i’m referring to can be seen in some of the shots. The wall is really dark except for a strip of bright light down the left edge of the wall. This is the lighting artifacts I refer to.

    However in the last few hours of playing with it i’ve discovered it has something to do with shadowmaps. When I change my lights over to use raytraced shadows, the lighting problems go away. Yay!

    John Vanderbeck said this on April 30th, 2006 at 1:10 pm

  3. Yep.. Bricks in 8.5 is almost all BUT broken. (several other textures as well!) It’s so querky I don’t understand how a school could possibly assign a student a project that requires the use of it. What’s the point? To show the student how broken it is? Just tell them - done.

    That said, John has done a great job of working around the problems (something a professional would NEVER waste their time doing BTW!) to create a pretty convincing loading dock. He’s still working on it so I’m waiting to see the end results… ;) From what there is so far it oughtta be pretty sweet!!!

    Tesseelator said this on May 1st, 2006 at 1:45 pm

  4. Thanks for the comment Tess!

    After working all weekend on those darn bricks, I go into class on Monday and they teach us about laying out custom UV coords and UV mapping in manners other than the basic planar, cubic, etc, and then tell us that we can now use image maps on the walls if we want.

    *major groan!*

    However, with all the time I spent on those bricks, they really do look good and i’m just too stubborn to change it. They’re staying procedural :)

    John Vanderbeck said this on May 2nd, 2006 at 5:17 pm

Leave a Reply