Hi all. You can probably find dozens of posts online that will tell you how to make textures. Here’s another one. But I won’t tell you how to suck eggs (not too much). Instead, I will show you just what I did and (for those new to doing this as some of you have suggested in your comments) how I am convinced that even making your own textures is pretty darn simple (time consuming and repetitive but simple).

First, I have set this scene in a corridor and that is going to need stone walls. After all, there is something majestic about stone - so many of the public buildings use it. I got my mobile phone and went for a walk around town (Sydney) looking at stone buildings. At Observatory Hill I found a nice wall and took this picture of part of it:

Now my goal is to create an image that repeats itself and yet looks like it doesn’t. You know, tiled textures. So obviously this photo is no good by itself. The top part is darker than the bottom part. The stone blocks don’t really match in colours at the left and right, top and bottom sides. So I cut out a section of blocks that are pretty much the same.

The next bit is my favourite.

Using Filter, Other, Offset I fiddle around till some of the bottom of the picture is at the top and some of the left of the picture is at the right.

It look pretty average here, but then a bit of cleverness with the clone tool and voila!

And then I added the texture to Sweet Home 3D (which I do by double clicking on a wall in the plan pane and clicking the Texture button). Hence:

But things don’t work out as expected:

As you can see, there is a recurring line of grey and brown that is really obvious. I need to go back, re-edit the texture and try again. So I do, this time searching for grey and adding brown to it.

And now I think it looks fine again until I load it up and… well, another pattern emerges. I do this about seven times until I get something usable. All in all it takes me about an hour. So don’t believe those experts who make it look easy in videos. It takes time, but it’s worth it. By the time I find a version of the texture that I like I have also added some exterior architectural elements so that I can use the outside as a set some time too. Hence:

For the inside I want the stone to be more “dressed” as they say (makes you wonder about nude stone!). So I repeat this entire process (sigh) with another picture that I took of a wall at the old NSW Department of Education building in Sydney.  This I add to the interior walls. But what about the floor?

So I check out my bathroom. (Note to self – clean it one of these days.)

Perfect!  And so I create the following:

Yep – as simple as that; my bathroom floor. This is a big point in making textures: look around you at the familiar and try to imagine it as something exotic.

Now the interior is laid out thus:

Pretty good in my humble opinion.

So there I have it. The first step of my scene’s set is done. Next time I hope to get to work on displacement and bump maps in another product so as to give the surfaces a real sense of depth.

Thank you all for reading :)

Greg

 

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