Brick Wall Tutorial

Creating an old stucco wall with patches of exposed brick was something I began to wonder about after watching the video "Wings of the Dove", because much of the story takes place in Venice and some of the old buildings had the crumbling stucco over old brick walls. As soon as I started thinking about it, it was obvious that the texture had to be made in several stages. The following tutorial explains the steps I eventually used.

Step One - Making the old brick surface

Old brick is generally much more blotchy in its colors than new brick, and has the distinctive whitish patches of old stucco. So step one was to create an image of blotchy brick tones with white patches. For the brick coloration, I played with various modified materials before finally settling on the material shown in Image #1. (Use your Back button to return to the tutorial.) It forms the brick color and was applied to a big flat cube.

The white blotches, shown in Image #2, were added to the brick material by using a terrain element, colored white and positioned so only parts of it protruded up through the crude brick surface. Image #3 shows the wireframe of the white terrain selected in red, while Image #4 shows the base brick cube selected in red so you can see the relationship between the two parts.

From a top view, the brick/white spot combination was rendered and saved for use as an image texture map.

Step Two - Making the brick wall

The bricks are terrain elements. One was created, as you can see in Image #5, as just a square shape with some edge irregularity. It was then stretched twice as long as wide, for a nice brick shape. The brick surface image from Step One was applied to it as a 2D (picture) material source and a World Top mapping mode was assigned. Then the brick object was duplicated and several were arranged in rows as real bricks are, as shown in Image #6. The World Top mapping mode was chosen so the texture changes from one brick to the next. This insured that each brick looked different.

The cement grout was added by creating a cube and assigning it a jumbled rock texture from the Bryce library (it's on the bottom row, far to the right, in "Rocks"). Image #7 shows the grout cube selected in red and you can see how its top edge is well below the top of the brick, so it has a sunken quality. In Image #8, I purposely positioned the grout cube so only the right half has the grout, and the left half is without it, so you can see how the brick terrains render out with and without the grout added. Finally I positioned the grout cube so it was under all the bricks and I rendered a final image of bricks with grout.

Step Three - Making the final wall

The final wall has three simple parts. One is the cube creating the wall itself, and assigned a Positive attribute and a stucco texture. The second part is the terrain that makes the irregular hole in the wall. Its assigned a negative attribute and the same stucco texture so when its grouped with the wall cube, it cuts the hole and applies the same texture to the cut edges.

The third part is a cube that has the rendered image of the brick (from Step Two, above) applied to it parametrically. It is set behind the terrain "hole" at whatever depth looks nice. Image #9 and Image #10 show these three objects from a 3/4 view and a side view.

Image #11 is the rendered result.

Image #12 is an example of another test of the same process.

Bill Munns