Anyone have a good cobblestone/mosaic style mat/procedural? or know how to make one? I'm trying to create a textured floor without using the straight line tile floor mats that I seem to find everywhere. I'm trying to make an outside floor look believable from a very low camera and light angle, but everything I've tried looks like a lo-rez JPG, and destroys what could be a good scene.

Are you looking for it to be a Vue Procedural material, or image-based?

Whenever I do Vue-based materials, it's with the expectation that I'll be going over them like crazy in Photoshop. I have much better luck just making my materials in Photoshop as large TIFs (Color, Bump, and Displacement) and apply accordingly. They look more realistic as well.

Need some TIFs?
If you want a fantastic starting point, go to www.cgtextures.com and look through their floors and tiles sections.

Hope this helps-
-Lew ;-)

Lew-
With my lack of success with image based textures, I was thinking of going with procedural. I can find all kinds of regularly lined tiles, but nothing with a more random appearance, or even circular.
Thanks for the tip on the website. I'll give them a look.

I recently did an image with a mosaic ("Surrealistic Still Life") and I did like wabe: I just made an ecosystem of chamfered rectangles. Advantages of ecosystems over materials, in this case, include: a) extreme precise positioning, b) you can turn individual eco instances into objects and manipulate them individually in order to make localized effects, like I did, c) you can mix several kinds of materials and get higher diversity, d) you can use ecosystem effects to have higher diversity (rotation, elevation, etc).
One drawback of ecos is higher memory usage, of course...

In addition, if you want circular patterns (or other kinds), you can also make them with ecosystems, driving the rotation with a function, for example.

Neat cobbelstones Wabe, I wouldn't mind some of that if you get round to offering it up!!!

That's awesome wabe, this would surely be a seller if you released it. Amazing detail.

I could have made it tighter (more crisp edged stones) but went for the smoothed out - been-walked-and-driven-on-for-decades - look.

Edit - forgot to mention these tidbits - once you make ONE of these, you can position them together as a road, a pathway, etc.

This was also a TINY extraction (you can see some pixellation) from a much larger image - in which case I could have done a rather large chunk of road all in one shot and would have less to duplicate and position later.

ALSO - once you make a good base from an image - you can TILE them so they're easier to dupe and position.

Hope this helps-
-Lew ;-)

Lew-
Very nice.
Did you use the height map to create a terrain, and then apply texture and bump?
How does different lighting effect its appearance? One of the problems I have with using textures is that the shadows are already there, and may appear odd when real shadows are created from the object.

As far as the Bump application - with image-based textures it's usually best to keep it low - like in the attached image I have it set to .05

Unless it's a very high res image (2048x2048 or larger) you will start seeing unusual blocky shaped hard shadows, and the shading of the image (usually a photo) will provide what looks like a shadow anyway.

If you MAKE your own image from scratch, you should also provide at least a TINY BIT of shadow information as surfaces get deeper or go behind other surfaces.

Hope this helps-
-Lew ;-)

Another note I just thought of - look at the cobblestones above - full size it - and you will see the actual BUMP created by the Bump Map almost starts looking like "spikes" - not smoothly rounded bumps.

When I first applied it, the Bump Depth was set to 1.000 and the shadows really overtook the color of the Color Map - which already had shadows of its own built-in.

THIS is why I keep photo-based texture bumps down to a minimum unless I'm going for something over the top - like peeling and cracked paint on crusty old walls - in which case I would make it even higher - like 5-8!

Okay - here's how it worked:

1 - I applied the Height Map (which the one I used I had converted to 16bit - actually didn;'t need to do this given what I'm about to describe - it can stay a little jaggied) - changing the Terrain Size to match - THEN divided the size in HALF and Diffusive Eroded (to smooth it out a little), then DOUBLED the size back up to the original size. When you get it back into Vue's main viewer, lower the height to taste.

2 - Color & Bump Maps - applied a basic Default Grey Mat - went into the Basic Material Editor and applied the Color and Bump Maps. Went back into the Advanced Material Editor and changed the Bump Map to be .05 Depth.

Viola!
hope this helps-
-Lew ;-)

Outstanding! Although I've done this before, the information about reducing, then resizing really helps! Have you considered doing tutorials?
Thanks
Mike

If you do not find what you need at CGTextures (an excellent source of free textures) or need out of the box tileable textures, check out these texture packages at DAZ.
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3360
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3359
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=2543
The kits are $1.99 for platinum club members.
I have the Dark Design ones and find them quite interesting. They include a few cobblestones and wall textures which are typically 1500 by 1500 pixels. There are ready made bump maps for some of them. They also have lots of architectural details to add, if you plan to do so.

Here is a picture made using the dark design wall texture (rendered in Bryce). I turned it into a terrain before, using the technique I describe in this Bryce tutorial (it works the same way in Vue)

Slick!
I'd thought about making exotic building walls this way before - so far I've just done specific shaped terrains (with walkways, etc.) and cliff-sides. Cool image!
-Lew ;-)

Still needs some tweaking. The brass insert needs to be refined, and the gray stone mortar has too much tinge to it.
This will be the base for a scene that I should be posting this next week sometime.
Thanks to everyone that helped!

Niiiiiiceee!!
Like it a lot! How big did your texture map being? I think Vue can handle up to 4096x4096 for textures, if that helps?
-Lew ;-)

I used a Terrain to create the floor itself, four layers (You can see part of it on the top edge of the picture, where it folds over visible, the net effect is simple molding and a step up) The texture maps are 2000x2000 (still has some jpg rough edges on the pattern) Then I used a series of different materials with occlusion maps (circle and zig-zag patterns created in photoshop- 3 different maps in all) to create the different zones of material. The cobblestone itself is a pretty decent image that was not created to be tiled, so I mirrored rather than repeat tile to help get rid of really bad seams (still has them, but not as noticeable.) Used both a bump map for depth and occlusion map (created in Crazy Bump) to create a different material for the mortar (thus the tinged color) as well as a specular map to help with the highlights.
I tried to create a full size terrain with all the cobblestone involved, but did not work as well as I had hoped. But your tips really helped otherwise for the rest.
I think the map for the zigzag may need to be bigger as there is noticable jaggedness. Which brings up a question: Should I use a different format than a max JPG?

TIF, TGA, BMP - none of those are compressed.
But if it's small, you'll STILL get jaggies. Try making a big one - 4096x4096 - and see if you can still see it there?
-Lew ;-)

oops, meant to say distribution maps instead of occlusion maps for the material placements.

offrench - I was looking at the DAZ items you mentioned. Since I don't use my Bryce and want them only for Vue, what are the formats? I know on one it says png, but are some of the main ones only for use in Bryce or are they all png orj pegs?

They looked interesting and I was thinking of getting them if I can use the main ones in Vue.

Thanks