Tileable sculpts

A tileable sculpt is a sculpted patch of surface whose edges match, so that once it is baked to a flat plane it repeats seamlessly as a tileable material. It is how many studios make stone, cobble, brick and cliff textures with hand-made shapes that procedural noise struggles to produce.

The sculpt itself does not ship. What ships is a set of maps (height, normal, ambient occlusion, masks) baked from it and finished in a texturing tool. See digital sculpting for the craft in general and procedural materials for the finishing stage.

#Where tileable sculpts are used

• Stone and rock materials. The tiling rock materials on Jared Sobotta's The Last of Us Part I rock set started as two sculpts combining hand sculpting and alphas (ArtStation: Rock Breakdown).
• Ground cover. Sobotta's river rock materials sculpt the large rocks in ZBrush and scatter small rocks from two sculpted atlases (ArtStation: River Rock Breakdown). His free beach cobble tutorial covers a similar material, with sand, shells and stones (ArtStation: Creating Beach Cobbles in Zbrush/Substance…).
• Erosion and terrain. His erosion work for the same game uses a tiling sculpt built with WrapMode (ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown).
• Architecture and trims. Paweł Kostecki's stone tomb wall material for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, used in the Gizeh tombs, lists ZBrush among its tools (ArtStation: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Stone…). Kirill Khafizov sculpted the base of a trim texture in ZBrush and extracted a tileable height map from it for Substance 3D Designer (80 Level: How to Make Atmospheric Stylized Modular…). See trim sheets.

#1. Decide the world size first

Write down how much of the world one tile covers, for example 2 × 2 m, and at what resolution. That fixes the texel density and the real size of every stone. The arithmetic is on tileable materials. Sculpt at that real scale, with a human-sized reference nearby.

#2. Set up the canvas

You sculpt on or above a flat plane that represents one tile. Any detail that crosses an edge has to continue on the opposite edge.

ZBrush WrapMode. With WrapMode on, brush strokes wrap across the edges of the tile. Sobotta sculpts "the plane with "WrapMode" on" and checks the tiling constantly (ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown). Sergii Zlobin (FRAGLAB) makes two square planes, one for navigation and a slightly larger one for sculpting to avoid artefacts, and warns: "Always check wrap mode is 1 when switching brushes!" (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…).

Blender Tiling. Sculpt Mode's symmetry settings include Tiling: "Using this option allows you to seamlessly tile your strokes along the given axes" (Blender Manual: Symmetry). Tile Offset sets the tile size per axis; "the default tile size is set to one unit" (Blender Manual: Symmetry). Make your plane exactly one tile in size, or change the offset to match it.

Without a wrap mode. You can also duplicate pieces that cross an edge and move each copy by exactly one tile width. This is the manual version of what the wrap modes automate. FlippedNormals' short video Making Tileable Textures in ZBrush presents another ZBrush method for tiles (YouTube: Making Tileable Textures in ZBrush - Top…).

#3. Sculpt the pieces separately

Do not sculpt a wall as one surface. Sculpt a few individual pieces (stones, bricks, rocks), then arrange them.

• Zlobin starts with four block meshes of different sizes and proportions. "Four bricks with six unique surfaces each give us a huge variety for the tiling texture" (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…).
• Sobotta's large river rocks were sculpted from ZSpheres; small rocks came from two atlases, one smooth and one sharp (ArtStation: River Rock Breakdown).
• His beach cobble material uses a sea shell atlas for the sand and a stone atlas for the small pebbles and micro stones (ArtStation: Creating Beach Cobbles in Zbrush/Substance…).

Each piece follows the primary, secondary and tertiary forms: primary mass, secondary planes and breaks, then a little tertiary detail. Zlobin adds cracks and damage with alphas, then polishes with a fine pore brush and a morph target (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…).

#4. Lay out from largest to smallest

Place the biggest pieces first and fill the gaps with smaller ones. Sobotta: "I start by laying out the Largest rocks on my canvas to setup my tiling sculpt. Always working from Largest to smallest I start layering in Rocks" (ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown). In his river rock layout, polygroup edges mark the tiling boundaries, and an ID mask is baked for use in Substance (ArtStation: River Rock Breakdown).

Rotate and offset repeated pieces. Zlobin rotates and moves bricks slightly to avoid a flat surface (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…), and rotation also hides that four bricks are being reused.

#5. Check the tiling constantly

Check as you go, not at the end. Sobotta says to "constantly check in 2.5D for tiling" (ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown). Outside ZBrush, render or bake a quick preview and view it tiled 3 × 3. Look for three problems:

• Seams at the borders.
• Hot spots: one distinctive stone that repeats into a visible grid.
• Uneven density: an empty corner or a crowded strip that shows up as a band when tiled.

#6. Bake to a plane

Bake the sculpt onto a flat, square low poly that matches the tile exactly. Typical outputs are height, normal, ambient occlusion and ID or colour masks. Zlobin bakes in Marmoset Toolbag, which he calls "the fastest and most flexible" option, and uses GrabDoc with a flat colour shader to create colour masks in ZBrush (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…). See baking and height and displacement maps.

When using ZBrush's 2.5D canvas, note that on Polycount, Bek warns not to press "bake" in the layer palette, because it "will cause a seam within zbrush" (Polycount: ZBrush Tiling Sculpts).

#7. Finish in a texturing tool

The bake gives you shape. Colour, roughness and small detail usually come from Substance 3D Designer or a similar tool:

• Sobotta adds micro detail to the sculpts for the height map in Designer and samples the albedo from real-world reference (ArtStation: Rock Breakdown).
• Zlobin uses Designer for colour variation, washout, mould and moss, and for building roughness, height and AO (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…).
• Sobotta's river rocks scatter the sculpted small-rock atlases with seven Atlas Scatter nodes, largest to smallest (ArtStation: River Rock Breakdown).

#How to make one

Sections 1–7 above explain each stage. This is the same process as a short recipe for a 2 × 2 m stone tile in Blender, with the ZBrush equivalent in brackets.

1. Fix the size. One tile covers 2 × 2 m and will be baked at 2048 px, which is 1024 px per metre. Model the tile as a 2 × 2 m plane.
2. Turn on tiling. In Sculpt Mode, enable Tiling on X and Y in the symmetry settings and set Tile Offset to 2 m on both axes, because "the default tile size is set to one unit" (Blender Manual: Symmetry). [In ZBrush, turn on WrapMode, and check it is 1 after switching brushes (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…).]
3. Sculpt four pieces. Sculpt four stones of different sizes and proportions as separate objects; Zlobin's "four bricks with six unique surfaces each" give enough variety (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…).
4. Lay out largest first. Place the largest stones, then fill with smaller ones, rotating repeats (ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown; 80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…). Copy any stone that crosses an edge and move the copy exactly 2 m to the opposite side.
5. Check tiling. View a 3 × 3 preview and look for seams, hot spots and empty corners (ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown).
6. Bake to the plane. Bake height, normal, AO and an ID mask onto a 2 × 2 m plane at 2048 px (80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…). See baking.
7. Finish the material. Add colour, roughness and micro detail in Substance 3D Designer or a similar tool (ArtStation: Rock Breakdown; 80 Level: Creating a Stone Wall Material in ZBrush…). See procedural materials.

#Video tutorials

#Use in recent games

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024). Paweł Kostecki's stone tomb wall material was "used in the Gizeh tombs" and lists ZBrush among its tools (ArtStation: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Stone…). Other artists extended the tomb kit with custom pieces "using finalised trims and tilables" (ArtStation: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Tomb Kit).
• The Last of Us Part I (2022), Naughty Dog. Sobotta's tiling rock materials started as two sculpts, his river rock materials scatter two sculpted atlases with seven Atlas Scatter nodes, and his erosion material is a WrapMode tiling sculpt (ArtStation: Rock Breakdown; ArtStation: River Rock Breakdown; ArtStation: Erosion Breakdown).
• God of War Ragnarök (2022), Santa Monica Studio. Jon Arellano's Asgard materials were made "using a mixture of zbrush and Substance Designer", and his breakdown shows each one on a flat plane as well as on an object (ArtStation: God Of War Ragnarok Materials).

#Further reading and watching