Any good guides on how to tile textures for level design? (texture tiling?)

How can I learn to tile textures and reuse them and use texture pages/texturetile sets? I know many games have used this technique and i read an article on Doom (2016) about this.

You can do this easily with substance designer… However the way you need to organize them depends on your level, i also think this is mostly used heavy in mobile games developement.

There’s 3 separate things you are asking about.

Create tiling textures
Reusing textures
and using texture pages/texturetile sets

Since you specifically mentioned Doom, I’m going to assume you mean 3d, but the example you used is for 2d/grid/tile based games.

Hands down, the best program for creating tiling textures is Substance Designer, but there is a pretty steep learning curve.

For reusing textures, usually this is done by designing assets to be modular. There’s tons of ways you can approach it, but here’s a good place to start Modular environments - polycount Triplanar projection, vertex painting, etc, can help add variation and allow you to reuse tiling textures.

Using a texture atlas mostly requires pre-planning. The idea is to put a bunch of textures that will be reused and used together, usually sharing a material. Lots of times this is done with decals, signs, minor props, set dressing type details.

No, the first picture is taken from Doom (2016)

See: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/…raphics-study/

I also download a program called “Spyro World Viewer” which is program that allows you to view all the levels from the Spyro games and can also extract the textures used in a level you have loaded as a bitmap image. Spyro games are all in 3D.

https://i.imgur.com/zYghOfJ.png

https://i.imgur.com/7wZURhg.jpg

What do you think about using Mari for this? That’s what I’m more familiar with and I know it’s been compared to Substance Painter.

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Using a texture atlas mostly requires pre-planning. The idea is to put a bunch of textures that will be reused and used together, usually sharing a material. Lots of times this is done with decals, signs, minor props, set dressing type details.
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How do you use texture atlases in UE4? Thanks for the name though. I wasn’t sure the term used.

First image didn’t load for me.

Mari is mostly designed around painting textures onto a model, not sure how a tiling texture would be created/approached in Mari.

For a texture atlas in UE4, you’d just make one material with the atlas and assign it to multiple assets (or parts of an asset depending on the context)

Do you mean the doom one in first post or the spyro ones?

Does using the texture atlas optimize the game. I think I read something about lowering number of draw calls?
Why can’t you make multiple materials for each asset that all use the texture atlas as the base color/texture sample?

I read a forum post that suggested three different options for texture atlas

**"1. Lay out the object UVs in your DCC package relative to your texture atlas (create your UV map specifically to make use of your atlas in the way that you want). Very manual, but very efficient.

  1. Use the textureCropping function to isolate the different parts of your atlas in a material
    https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…exturecropping

  2. Use the ‘Merge actors’ tool to combine meshes together, and create a combined texture atlas from their respective textures
    "**

I’m not sure which of the methods is the best and the least “expensive”/taxing on the hardware. Which do you think?

Not quite sure if this will help you but I have a non repetitive tiling material on the marketplace that can tile textures at an infinite scale without repetition. It works for both geometric patterned textures as well as organic…

You ought to first learn to use some textures in UE4 to create materials, and how to apply those correctly to specific meshes / objects. Read the docs and look for tutorials on how to project textures in world or local space, and also how to get 3D effects using parallax occlusion mapping, bump offset, and world displacement. Then return to texture atlas topics after you’ve understood and performed some of those I referenced. One ‘approach’ to texture atlas as I understand from the docs is they’re automatically generated from the various textures placed on meshes/objects in a level. You can also create them yourself, but that’s a ton more time-consuming and difficult. Yet it wouldn’t be bad to learn it to an extent, it could also be helpful in modifying or troubleshooting the auto-generated texture atlas in UE4. Doom(2016), which I own on PS4, and have worked with the map editor in, is not the best example for texture tiling. Lots of the textures in it were created using much older, more stringent methods, and have a number of lighting and shadowing differences from how UE4 does things now, especially with respect to ray tracing. Spyro is a basic example of texture tiling, but depending on the kind of game you intend to create, is probably not sufficient to learn what’s really involved. Fully dynamic lighting in UE4 lends itself to far less or no UV mapping work, according to the docs and in the forums, but is difficult to get right in a variety of scenarios for level design. So a blend or combination of dynamic and static lighting is a more optimal option, also because it’s less expensive in memory and processing than fully dynamic…and less time-consuming than fully or mostly static lighting. So, I suggest learning to create materials first, projecting the materials onto actual game meshes (not just flat walls / floors / ceilings / spheres / etc) in world and/or local space, and then learning lighting. Then, the preparations are in place to learn how to create tiling texture sets and such to optimize and build workflow(s).