Brick material with corrective corner tiling

When a standard tiling brick texture is used, the illusion is easily broken when corners are involved. I have created a brick wall material that is both tileable, and accurately represents the 3D depth of bricks around sharp corners.

Software used

• Maya

• Houdini

• Zbrush

• Marmoset Toolbag 3

• Substance Designer

I started by blocking out in Maya how the brick shapes could fit together for both a flat tiling wall, and for a 90 degree corner.

I modeled each colored section separately in Houdini in order to start with a base on procedurally bumpy bricks before importing each section into Zbrush.

In Zbrush, I assembled each section of bricks into the shape for a flat wall piece which I laid out in Maya. I sculpted additional detail, and also modeled the mortar for the flat wall section.

With that, the high poly mesh for the flat wall section was finished. For the corner wall section, I imported the high poly mesh into Maya, and rearranged the sections to match the shape of the corner wall piece. I welded the edges of the mortar and fixed the creases with the relax brush in Maya as well.

I baked the textures from the high poly meshes to the low poly meshes for both the flat wall and the cornered wall in Marmoset Toolbag. I colored the mortar of the high poly meshes black, and the bricks white, in order to bake masks which would be used to color the bricks. I also baked the normal maps and base color maps in Marmoset.

Finally, I imported the textures and masks for both the flat wall and cornered wall into Substance Designer.

The mask textures from Marmoset Toolbag are used with a flood fill node and several modifiers to color the bricks. The corner textures need to be tileable with the flat wall textures, so several position offset and blend nodes are used to make the correct colors tile between both the flat wall and corner wall textures.