Well, this tutorial, sincerely, it didn’t take me more than 5 minutes to get it accomplished, perhaps because i have already worked in a ceramic factory, but no, i don’t think so. You know that there are a lot of ready materials to be downloaded for free in great sites that i will discuss later, but often depends on your needs and purpose, you want custom made materials.

To make a custom ceramic tile, we are not going to need much time or effort, first we are going to create our diffuse map, which will be the colourful part of our ceramic tile, and you can just open photoshop, create a 250×250 image, use a lot of random pixels with different opacity levels, and then you will get in something like this:

Make sure you will leave this little grey/white space on the corner, because that’s what will separated the tiles from one another.

Then the next thing you are going to do, is create another 250×250 map, this time, you will make sure that the colourful part is going to be white, and the edges will be black, or almost black, so create and call it ceramicbump:

This is going to be our bump and reflection map, the reason why it is like that is that the 3dsmax interpretates on maps other than the diffuse white and the colour where the map will have more intensity, and black as the absence of influence of such map. It goes like that for almost any map, reflection, refraction, opacity, bump, and so on.

Now we are going to move on 3dsmax. I made the material using the Vray render engine, but you can use any render, it goes more or less the same for all, create a material, and on the diffuse slot you will put a bitmap, that will be our tile you saw upwards, the colourful one, make sure you click that little cube so it will be displayed on the viewport, you will need that later.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Now, we are going to create our bump map, just scroll down on your material until you get to the material maps, choose bump, and then put a bitmap map on it, which will be the ceramicbump file you created on photoshop, use the same file to create a reflection map and use the following parameters: 15 for the reflection and 30 for the bump:

Now apply the material to your target surface, may it be a wall, or floor, or ceiling, just apply it and you will see that one giant tile is filling your whole surface, that’s why we are now going to the Modifiers menu, choose UV coordinates and apply an UVW map to the surface, once it has been applied, you will choose the best tiling for it, often you will want to put the same material in different surfaces, so that’s why it’s better to tile the object and not the material itself:

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as you can see i put 60×60 tiles in the UV coordinates, it is a planar map because my surface is a plane, and thanks to that little cube on our material, we can see how it adjusts to the surface without having to render it. So finally i added some lighting and a torus knot to see our final result:

Click it to enlarge and you will see how the tiles behave nicely, they reflect just on the ceramic part and the it has the perfect elevation between the ceramic part and the edges, Bravo! Now, let’s get some more money online…