Bricks and Blocks by Philipk

Create a new empty layer and do the same proceedure, only now you will need to extend your selection a bit. For this you can use "Refine Edge" again when you are done filling up new ones. I made them black right away. The same thing now, create a copy, flatten, generate normal and mask the result with your copy.

Now you have both bricks pushed out and pushed in. You can of course play around a lot more with this adding more levels of pushed in and pushed out bricks to exaggerate the effect. You may also want to fix the edges a bit more square, but that can easily be done later on.



Next step is to add angle information. I do this the same way as the two steps above. Only now I am using top, down, left and right (for example RGB Up 127,255,127/Down 127,0,127/Left 255,127,127/ Right 0,127,127) normal angle information. I used a pretty low opacity to be able to click more than once on certain bricks to create a stronger angle on some bricks. I then just overlay this result at a pretty low opacity.



The diffuse shaped up quickly since I already had a base that I color/contrast adjusted and smoothed out a bit. I then added two variation materials, one overlayed and one with normal blending mode but masked using "Select > Color Range" when creating the mask. The masked images does not have to, or actually should not be, another brick image since the stones will not be aligned with your stones then. Better use concrete and such materials in general to overlay and vary up the diffuse/spec/gloss.

I used another concrete image for the seams, since I already have masks for that it is really easy to adjust anything you want on the bricks, ranging from brightness variation on certain bricks to the seams hue and brightness.

You can see some variations I did with the bricks in the top left using the information I had from layers in the normal map.



The "ambient occlusion" was faked by using the normal map blue channel with some tweaking. I also used the blue channel to create an edge definition map that I screen on the texture to define the bricks a bit better.