BerconTile 3.02 overview

BerconTile 3.02 by Jerry Ylilammi is a versatile texturemap for 3dsMax 2012. Since a few updates this map has changed significantly. In this article I’d like to show a few ways how to use the berconTile texturemap. It’s by no means a complete reference of all the functions but it should help out users to make it work for them.

Find general info on berconTile, multiTexture and the downloads for this set of maps on the site of Jerry Ylilammi. BerconTile has some very easy to understand settings, other settings may take a bit of tweaking to get right. I’ve needed quite some time to understand how the UV-mapping within this map works.

	Tiling These settings haven’t really changed over time, but they’re very important to the appearance of the tiles. The Size-parameter scales the entire map. The Width and Height parameters determine the size of a single tile. Note that not for every patterntype these sizes are taken precisely. Let’s say you use a UVW modifier on your object with a size of 1 (or you use real world scale map coordinates) then the tiles in this example will be 4 by 2 units. Note that you can add variation to the size of the tiles with the %-parameters to the right.
	Colors Color #1 is the color of the tile. This is the color you’re most likely to put another texturemap in. Color #2 and the edge colors both determine the edges and the blending colors. In previous versions you could use color #2 to add variation to the body-color of the tile. I couldn’t get this to work in the same way as before. The possibilities to do this have been expanded quite a bit, so it works a bit differently.
	Tile UV mapping types This section is the thing that really sets berconTile apart from the default tile-map. Each single tile in berconTile can have its own UV-coordinates. This is also the section that has gotten a lot of attention in the update. You can switch the UV-mapping on and off, choose a specific type of mapping and set the UV-channel. Especially setting the right channel is very important.
	Tile UV mapping randomization You can randomize the UV-coordinates for every single tile. These settings speak for themselves.
	Tile UV mapping Center mapping This setting replaces what previously had been named “Variation”. You can give each tile a solid color which is derived from another map, such as a noise, gradient or bitmap. This enables you to make mosaic-type images or create powerful masks. You should also pay attention to set the right mapping channel.
	Tile UV mapping Randomize berconTile plays well with two other maps by Jerry Ylilammi: Multitexture and Bercongradient. Multitexture is a texture written for CG-source. It’s been designed to randomize a set of bitmaptextures such as individual floorboards on separate objects or materialID’s. Now it’s also possible to randomize separate textures on individual tiles. This is a major improvement and key-feature of the new berconTile.

Examples

In this example I’ve applied an image to the color #1 slot. The plane is about 500 units and has a UVW modifier with the size of 1.0. The tiles are 20 units. To get the image of the working you need to pay attention to the mapping-coordinates. You can either use the same coords you use for the tiles: 1.0. This means you have to tile the image 1/500 (the plane is 500 units). You can also use a second UVW modifier on channel 2 and set the bitmap to the same channel to control the mapping in a more flexible way.

This example uses the “Enable center mapping” option. The bitmap still is applied to Color #1. The result is a mosaic type of image. You need to set the channel of this option to the same channel you’ve set the bitmap to, in this case channel 2. Now comes the hard part: when using this option, the mapping coords from the tiles themselves are applied even if they’re on another channel. Any extra mapping coordinates from UVW modifiers on that channel (number 2 in this example) are ignored. This is a bit confusing. It means we have to set the mapping channel of the image of the pig to 2 and set the tiling to 0,002 (1/500). You can even delete the second UVW modifier you might have added. It’s not used in this setup.

Similar to the pig (bitmaptextures) is the use of procedural maps together with the tiles-map. Again you need to pay attention to the mapping.

Multitexture

BerconTile works very well together with multitexture. You can randomize single textures across the individual tiles. This makes it very useful for wooden floors, brick walls, any tiling surface. The multiTexture doesn’t support mappingchannels. At least there’s no option to change the mappingchannel. I’m assuming the multitexturemap uses the channel 1 by default. I’m getting good results when I set the UV-tile map of the berconTile to 1 and the mapping of the tilemap itself to 2. Again this is a bit counter-intuitive.

So you load a set of separate bitmaptextures, concrete tiles in this example, and by setting the right switches you can have a randomized pattern without any visible tiling. Multitexture lets you randomly adjust each tile with a gamma, hue and saturation setting.

Multitexture setup