Need to recreate a ceramic tile

#1

I have a kitchen tile that I need to recreate. I’m using Maya 2016 and Renderman.

The tile has a physical height to it - like a topography. When the actual tile is created, the glaze settles into the “valleys”, which end up darker than the “mountains”. I can’t figure out a way to get the material to mimic that glaze style.

In addition, there are a lot of random glaze splotches which are visible in the tile, and which are unique to each tile. I’m not sure how to procedurally create each blotch such that it can be unique. There will be around 50 tiles in the final render, if I have to modify each tile it’s not the end of the world.

The exact tile doesn’t exist yet, but this is the same idea: Tile photo

Thanks for the help!

#2

this little fella should do wonders…

https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer

if you can’t afford it and your moral compass points up i would say just model one tile (major grout details or whatever they are called and all), unwrap it and cut the grout detail out so it is a separate in your texture (this gives nice clean edges), paint one big ass version of your dark grey texture with the little splotches and a little section for the grout colour, duplicate the modeled tile to cover your “wall”, now move the UVs of the darker grey bits of the model all over your big ass grey and splotch covered texture to give variation. once this is done, you’ll only be dealing with one texture and one shader…

to get the glaze seeping into the valley’s bit you’ll need to either look up how to use “sampler_info” nodes (google) or use layered shaders (also google).

there are many other ways but this should be somewhat painless.

#3

I’ve been OT on another job so haven’t had a chance to read this until now. I’ll post back if I can’t figure out how to follow your directions. Thanks for the advice!

#4

I use Maya/mental ray, and to solve this I use a separate image-map for the reflections as well as one for the bump. This turns off the reflections of the grout between tiles, and works especially well for glass or ceramic tiles.

That is, three image-maps total. 1 for diffuse, 1 for reflections, 1 for bump/displacement. Grout is almost never shiny or reflective, you see.

Of course you CAN model in each tile to physically protrude from the grout/base, but if you need to make changes or show tile/accent-tile options quickly, that becomes beyond tedious. Much, much easier to control with a few image files which are easily altered/adjusted in Photoshop and output again.