Tiling Solutions

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hi

I am a complete novice with UE4 so please excuse my stupidity if I ask seemingly obvious questions.

I run a tile showroom, with porcelain, ceramic tiles.

I want to be able to give my customers a virtual experience in Ue4, and show them our entire tile collection in Ue4 on Arch Viz environments and be able to change the wall and floor tiles and different tile sizes on the fly in game in front of the client.

I have collected high res photos of each tile, now I want to place in Ue4 and build a texture library and then blueprint interactive menus with the texture library.

Each tile is unique and has a unique design and comes in sets with slight variations of the same design when ordered. Ie no tile is exactly the same, so I don’t want to take 1 tile and tile a wall with one design. How do I take my one tile and create variations of the patterns and designs, Not colour, and tile entire walls and floors with specific measurements inside Ue4 an be able to change those measurements on the fly.

I am so so lost here. I need to also have grout between the tiles and need to be able to change the grout colours from eg dove grey to white etc, and be able to change 60x60cm tiles to say 90 x 120 cm on the fly in game. I don’t need to change any colours of any tile.

Any help would be very much appreciated. I need to create blueprints that will give me the results I am looking for.

Thanks

2

Oh you are in need of some serious brick system. It would be very hard to create this with materials only. Its possible but that system will be inflexible.
You should rather go with instanced static meshes. Make testing tile that has dimensions of one of your tiles (do not make square here, make different dimensions for horizontal and vertical)

When you have that tile, make blueprint that spawns x * y tiles. For now spawn normal meshes not instanced ones. Do it in construction script.
You should get some basic setup.

Next you need to expose variables for either picking material for time or time meshes itself.

For materials create one master material, then expose textures it uses as variable. Create instance of it and set first tile materials. Do instance material for each tile.

Or if there is huge library of it, then rather do structure that holds all textures for single material. Then create array of that structures, then fill that array up with all tile textures.
To make it easier (if you have tile names) you can also create enumerator, with names of tiles then fill that array acoording to enum names.

Now you should have system that let you create any tile from your library just by picking its name from enum variable.

Next thing would be adding different rules for tiles, like making edges and corners out of tiles etc.

Last thing would be creating some mosaics out of tiles, placing them diagonally, cutting corners atc. That part is most challenging.

Also create all those above thins as functions in one blueprint. When all those modules work you can move them either to construction script or to runtime side.

Ps. this is something similar to your project, i tried to create some stairs and bricks spawner. Its not meant to showcase huge tiles collection, but rather to place multiple meshes to form stairs or walls. I hope this will be good start for you, or at lease you can get feew tricks out of it. I have bit better version now, but i am stuck at single problem without uch time to solve it.

project: Dropbox - File Deleted

3

Hi Nawrot

Thanks for the advice, I tried downloading but couldnt get files. Because I am a novice with all things Ue4, any chance you could explain your workflow as the above is great but goes over my head, so sorry

4

I just checked link it works. I kind of cannot explain whole thing, that project is big.
In my newer version i split it all into very basic modules, but currently it is nonfunctional (because i added new code that introduced some bugs, and I did not fix it yet).
So I am not uploading that version yet.