Dead Easy Tiles

Up until now, the way that I and many artists created tiles was like this:

It always produced poor results, because converting photos into maps (normal, glossy, reflection) is a guess. So getting the grout wrong, or missing important details like tile tilt is very common.

There are tile generators like RailClone for 3dsmax, that will physically model tiles, but they're far from easy to use. Especially if you want a fast result.

Since no better solution existed, we created one at Poliigon.

New Tile Solution

Instead of photographing tiles then converting them to maps, we used Substance Designer to carefully create each tile material from scratch. Resulting in a collection of maps that are accurate and can be used in any 3d software.

There are 33 new tile materials, and in this tutorial you'll discover how to use any of them to create gorgeous tiles in Blender, in seconds. (yeah yeah, the actual tutorial is 20 minutes, but that's because I explain everything :P)

What you'll need:

• Blender 2.78 or later (so you have adaptive subsurf and microdisplacements)
• Tile Material - Black Onyx Opalo
• The Starter.blend file
• PBR Node Groups (it's also included in the above starter file)

Quick Summary

Step 1: This is the node setup:

Step 2: Change the Feature set to Experimental

Step 3: Add an Adaptive Subsurf modifier

Step 4: Set the Material Settings displacement to Both

Hope you found the tutorial helpful! If you make something cool, please post it in the comments below :)