Week 7 - Monday: Custom Brick Texture

I have started bringing the external features of my mansion into Unreal Engine. I decided as I was doing so to try and create my own brick material for use on the exterior walls of the mansion. I was inspired by some custom materials that 3D game developer Mark Ranson has been posting on his Artstation page, which he created by baking high poly geometry down into a tileable texture.

Mark Ranson's brick material inspired me to create my own.

I felt it would be very useful to try doing this for myself, as I would be able to create the brick material to my own specification rather than rely on Google images and hope that it would have what I was looking for.

I started by creating a single brick model and tessellating the mesh so that it was dense enough to start adding details. I then stacked some editable modifiers onto the mesh so that I could add differentiation to each individual brick and avoid obvious tiling.

My brick model with added noise and displacement modifiers to help vary its shape.

Once the brick setup was complete, I created a 2048 x 2048 plane and subdivided it evenly so that I could accurately space the bricks across it:

By spacing the bricks evenly across this plane I intended to create a completely seamless texture.

I then rotated some of the bricks to create a little more variation in the pattern, as I felt it would look strange if they were aligned perfectly with one another:

The rotated bricks add some further variation to the pattern.

I then exported the 2048 x 2048 plane into Substance Painter and baked the high poly geometry onto it. You can see that the bake still looks rather flat. I intend to add parallax occlusion mapping as Mark has done with his material to help add some height to the texture.

A flat plane baked with the normal maps generated by the brick pattern that I made.

I added some standard Substance Materials to the texture and painted some of the bricks a slightly different colour to make it look more varied. I ended up toning this done however as it made the texture look very repetitive when it was tiled over a large surface:

The painted texture in Substance Painter.

Once I was happy with the look of the material I loaded it into Unreal Engine. I was pleased that I succeeded in creating a completely seamless texture but I am worried it will look unrealistic if it covers such a wide area:

My seamless brick texture as seen in Unreal Engine.

I have tried to make the tiling less noticeable by placing columns in front of open areas. So far I haven't applied the parallax occlusion mapping to the material yet and this may help to break it up further.

The brick material applied to an external wall.

As a test I think this was a successful exercise. I was able to create a seamless texture in a relatively short amount of time and should I need to do something similar again in the future, I know I can rely on this method.

Whilst the technique is sound, I think that the overall appearance of the material needs improvement. When comparing this material to something created using photogrammetry techniques, mine looks very fake. I would like to start blending this material with dirt and decals in Unreal Engine to help ground it in some realism.

RANSON, M. (2018). High-Quality PBR Industrial Herringbone Brick [Online Image]. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/59X1A [Accessed: 02/07/2018].