brick by brick

#1

I’m trying to find a way to build fancy brick facades with designs made by: protruding bricks; inset bricks; inset bricks turned laterally 45 Degrees to make a design; arches made to order, some with keystones others not, all in every shape and size… mostly Victorian brickwork. I am not adverse to building it brick by brick with a thin mortar joint, but I am asking here for any thoughts on how to go about it and whether one software or another would be better-suited to the task. Since what I’ve read about Softimage tells me it is among the best, maybe the best of all, I welcome any suggestions. No animation.

A conservative design in watercolor attached.

Thanks.

#2

Modelling brick by brick will take forever, and be unnecessarily heavy.

If you need actual displacement at render time, use a displacement map. Otherwise you can get away with a bump map (or a parallax map – you can download a parallax map shader from here: http://www.shaders.moederogall.com/).

If you really really must have everything as geometry, use a displacement map and then convert to geometry using SaveRenderMesh: http://www.andynicholas.com/?p=57

#3

Here is a nice texture creation program that can be used to generate brick (or anything else) textures QUICKLY! You can generate color, bump and displacement textures.

http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/brick_block/index.htm

#4

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.