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.
You can’t do it. You need to have a seamless texture ideally 1024x1024 pixels or larger with the variation in the texture. See Arroway Textures for a good example of high quality seamless textures.
I suggest you do it on the web site side. Render all your images exactly aligned, grout and tiles, with all the variations then have a system for the user to select the tile or grout combo they want. That’s how I have seen most web sites work.
I tried to change materials mid-game, but I think the “set material” blueprint node is very buggy. It might have something to do with how the engine figures out if lightmass is valid or not. Lightmass is how light bounces around in the scene, and all of that needs to be precomputed. If you change the texture mid-game, then it won’t be compatible with lightmass. The floor might need to be a dynamic object, which would really suck.
Another possibility is using texture parameters, and just changing the texture, not the entire material. Create a basic material, and drag in one texture. If you want the texture to be lit in realtime, you’ll need to create normal maps and set other values as well. Right click, and convert to a parameter. Change the name of the parameter to something easy to remember, like “Floor.”
In the blueprint, at the object’s creation in the construction script, create a material instance dynamic based off of the material you just made, and set the material instance dynamic to the mesh on the floor. Depending on how you want the controls, you can set the inputs to cycle through an array of textures, and there’s a number of ways to set that up. But the bottom line is as you cycle through to select the next tile, it sets the texture parameter to a new texture.
We can go insanely deep into this topic. I think it would be easier if you had the help of someone who better knows how to use this engine. What you’re asking for is not that easy to make if you’ve never touched the engine.
Not unless you program a shader that can take care of that for you. I have the system at the point now where I can easily implement a tile randomizing solution. All you need is a black and white mask texture between the tile and the grout, and a basic grout texture to blend between. The tiles themselves can be made to shift randomly.
I did this before with a simpler shader. I’ll try implementing that solution into my master tile shader right now.
OK, I was able to integrate the tile randomizer with the Perfect Tile System! It even works on non-standard tiling systems like bricks. I’ll include it in the next update. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with parallax at the moment because the pipelines are retenant.
