Someone Please Explain to me tiling textures...

iamtravis316

I have been trying to find out what exactly tiling textures is, the idea of it makes sense, but I cannot find a good guide on how to actually do it, or what exactly it is in practice. Any advice is MORE THAN welcome and appreciated.
I know how to make a tileable textures. The how to use it is what I need to know. Also, how to use stuff like decals with the tileable texture.

and yes I did search google but all I could find was stuff like how to make a tileable texture, not how to actually use it.

any help would be appreciated.

Asthane

Think outside the box--

--or rather, the UV square. UV coords outside the normal 0-1 range will loop/tile, yes it's that simple

kodde

I like this example image, pretty much speaks for itself.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=444791&page=7&pp=15#post4855106

It's made possible since you make sure to segment the mesh to cater the tiling of textures.

There's some more useful links on PC Wiki, look under "Environment Texturing":
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment

iamtravis316

thank you both! I appreciate it!

iamtravis316

I'm stilling having extreme difficulty grasping how to do this. I've seen some tutorials and im still not understanding it. everything i've tried so far is just looking like crap, and im getting frustrated. because so far i cant put a lot of detail in a 64x64 and tile it a lot of times and get it to look non repedtive, or even good from a distance, it looks semi good upclose but not good far away.

some questions i still have.
1. how do I go about tiling the textures?
2. how to make diffrent tiles/decals, in the same area/polygon?
3. do you have to make the uv's a certain way or use uvw map?
4. should i break up the mesh (the parts that will be diffrent textures) or just leave it one mesh?

Specifications
1. using 3ds max 2009, and photoshop CS4
2. textures need to be 64x64
3. for an iPhone game
4. using the Shiva engine

Jeremy Lindstrom

http://chrisholden.net/tutor/ (look specifically for Texturing Single Page vs Multiple) go do that step by step and it'll become pretty clear. It's a good one.

1.) a texture tiles automatically. Like for a wall just apply a material to a wall and it will tile. Nothing special you have to do.
2.) you have to create a second set of polygon or decal polygons to add the different decals to add grime dirt, etc.
3.)You can just map out for example a wall (one single square polygon) and map it to a tiling texture just uv it so it fills up the entire uv map square and it will tile in all both the x and y.
4.) You mean, break up the mesh into more then one object? You don't need it to be one contiguous mesh. For my work flow at work we can't use multitextures so I usually break up every texture by part getting that texture.

iamtravis316

thank you that helped, I'm just going to have to mess around with it more

Ninjas

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/06/how-to-make-a-seamless-tiling-texture/