Bricks and building slabs in general can be difficult to simulate with
textures. Of late, I've taken to building structures from discrete brick
objects, using random selection from a small array of differently textured
mesh bricks to cut down on memory usage. This can look great, especially
when the individual bricks can then also be randomly displaced or rotated
very slightly to give a sense of irregularity.

However, my simple bricks don't look so good close up, and I'm a little
dissatisfied with using isosufaces as substitutes, partly because it's
difficult to avoid sharp corners, but mainly because of the severe
speed/memory issues for large numbers of bricks. To this end, I've been
working on a macro to create boxes with rounded edges and corners purely as
meshes, together with an isosurface-like surface perturbation. The image
below shows two examples, using a granite pigment function. Obviously, this
is a simple example, but in principle any function can be used on the
surface, and the box can be given any dimensions and location. One could
also colour the bricks based on the pigment function used to generate the
surface (might have to take a look at that sandstone... :) ).

Once I've tidied up the code and made it more usable I'll post the source,
if anybody's interested!

Bill

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