Tiles are very regular when new, but as time passes, weather can begin to take its toll on the tiles. This tutorial deals with some techniques for weathering tiles and breaking up the regularity by Composing maps and layering textures to create the tiles and the weathering.
The original inspiration for this texture comes from Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, where I found these beautiful tiles.
Tiles from the nineteenth century, suffering the weather of the Amazon and the decline of the Rubber boom in Iquitos, Perú.
Due to the reflections, these tiles would have to be redrawn from a single sample.
A single tile for tracing
Tracing is done in Illustrator and Photoshop
From the tracing –and reinterpreting/simplifying– we obtain a Normal Map in Photoshop.
The normal map (click to enlarge)
This is the base for our Tile Texture.
First Texture: the tile
This tile texture will be applied to our geometry using cubic mapping, with a cube size of 1x1x1 in., aligning it to a corner of the geometry.
Positioning
This gives us the first render, where everything is perfect.
Just the tiles
Staining the Tiles
We will use a much larger mapping for the changes in color. The map is this.
The trick is to make the square fit the tiles
This map will be applied on the Diffuse, Ambient, Reflectivity, Specular Amount and Specular Color channels. In all cases they will be enlarged to an 8×8 scale and positioned with offset to each other.
The darkened tiles maps offset with respect to each other
The tiles begin to look weathered.
Render with some darkened tiles
Cracks
Cracks go on a different texture, layered on top of the tiles.
The stencil map is this one.
The stencil map
The bump map is the stencil map plus a little blur.
The texture looks like this.
Low diffuse and Ambient to create dark cracks
We’ll also use cubic mapping, this time 8x8x8 in. We should align the cracks with the same corner to which we aligned the tiles to make everything fit. The cracks make the tiles look quite weathered.
Cracks in place
If the pattern still bothers us, we can mitigate it by mirroring the tiling.
Mirrored tiling
Mirrored tiling can make the crack pattern less obvious, or not. Trial and error helps here.
We can (finally) add moss to the tiles, for a really neglected look. Moss would be made in a very similar way to the cracks.
