Create a Tile Imprint – SketchUp, Photoshop, Pixplant & V-Ray

By Nomer Adona

The idea behind this tutorial is to help you create a tile imprint design from scratch. I will move from one software to the next to accomplish each task. In this tutorial I will share my experience in preparing my textures using Photoshop and Pixplant. I will then demonstrate how I will use them in V-Ray for SketchUp.

1. Let me begin by using SketchUp for my tile design. I could use Photoshop directly, but I prefer SketchUp as I am used to working with it and I want to introduce it for this particular purpose. Here I modeled a 30cm x 30cm tile. I then quickly drew my design using Freehand, Arc, Offset and Paint Bucket Tool. Once I finished the design, I mirrored it in both directions, creating four tiles.

Step 1

2. I will now export my tile design imprint as a jpeg for the purpose of creating a displacement map in Photoshop. I clicked the Zoom Tool in SketchUp and typed “0” in the Measurements box to get parallel projection. I then clicked Top View using the Views Toolbar. The model is now ready to be exported as a 2D graphic in jpeg format. See the image below.

Step 2

3. Open Photoshop and load the exported image. To create a displacement map, I simply copied the image into another layer and applied a Gaussian blur filter to it. I did this to achieve a smooth transition between blacks and whites. In V-Ray for SketchUp, the whiter the areas are the, higher the displacement.

Step 3

4. Save this material as your “displacement map”.

5. Here is another material. I downloaded this one from the Net by ‘Googling’ and typing “Terra Cotta”. I will remove those grooves using the ‘Clone Stamp Tool’ in Photoshop. Once done I will save it as a jpeg image.

Step 4

6. Below is a seamless material I have done using Pixplant (you can download 30 day trial). The jpeg image that was done above was opened in Pixplant and created a seamless Diffuse map. You can also use Photoshop to create a seamless texture by using a filter called “Offset” and remove the unwanted seam using the “Clone Stamp Tool”. I found Pixplant to be a really cool software for doing this. The jpeg material below will be the base color of the tile.

Step 5

Here is a screen grab of Pixplant

Pixplant Screen Grab

I also saved a “Normal map” which will be used as a Bump map. I found using “Normal map” in Bump map slot gives a more effective map rather than a black and white Bump map.

Bump map

7. The image below shows the setup of the floor tiles in SketchUp. Here I did a 60cm x 60cm plane. I painted the Displacement map on this plane. This is very important because the mapping of the Displacement map will follow exactly the UV’s of this Diffuse map.

Step 7

8. The image below shows the settings in V-Ray for the imprinted tile material.

Step 8

The material is achieved by

• Creating another Diffuse layer (Diffuse 1)….load the brown Terra Cotta Diffuse map by clicking the small “m” beside the Color box of this new Diffuse layer.

• It is important that the old Diffuse layer (Diffuse) will not have any effect on the material other than its UV map setting…the transparency color must be turned into a complete white.

• Load the “Normal map” under the Bump slot.

• Load the “Displacement map” under the Displacement map. In this particular exercise the multiplier of both Bump and Displacement map are 0.2.

• Finally, create a Fresnel Reflection map with .07 – .08 Glossiness and 32 Subdivision.

Here is the rendered image

Image 1

Here it is with a Glossiness of .55 with less Reflection

Image 2

I hope you have learned something new here and you find it useful in your future projects.

Thanks

Nomer Adona

Some of Nomer Adona’s other tutorials here at SketchUpArtists:

• Lighting with V-Ray for SketchUp – definitive guide part 2
• Lighting with V-Ray for SketchUp – definitive guide part 1
• Basic IES Tutorial Using V-Ray for SketchUp
• Using HDRI in V-Ray for SketchUp
• IES Light Tutorial using V-Ray for SketchUp
• Texture Workflow with SketchUp, Photoshop and Podium
• Use Image Editing Software Inside SketchUp
• A Watercolor Line Drawing Ink Effect

Don’t forget to check out Nomer’s own website for more of his inspiring work and free resources.