Tilable Texture; Sculpting and Numbers Advice..

Dave Jr

Hi guys,

so I've been following this tutorial from the wiki on tillable textures:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1528364&postcount=1

in which I make a Tiled Texture then draw splines to match the shapes.

I've done this: which is here -

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However I've realised that theres 284 different rocks... as much as I don't mind sculpting these and I can obviously replace the non tiling rocks with repeats; will I find an issue later with my normal map considering the size/resolution in contrast to the quantity of the rocks?

Wouldn't it be better if there was for example less rocks and thus more normal map space?

I just don't want to go back and redo all of this; it would be such a bother to make a texture go from 284 to say 50...

I.e. at the moment each rock won't have a huge amount of pixels

Memory

Make your map bigger!

Textures always serve a purpose (in this case, learning) so that must be kept in mind when making one! Obviously, the more stones or whatever you have, the less pixels each one will take up. So yes, that's less info for your normal map as well.

Think of it this way: if you made this texture with 2 big rocks, a highlighted edge might be something like 32 pixels thick in a 512 x 512 map...your texture has 284 rocks - so in a 512 x 512 each highlight might get 1 pixel width if that.

The higher the res the more detail.

m4dcow

Dave Jr wrote: »

However I've realised that theres 284 different rocks... as much as I don't mind sculpting these and I can obviously replace the non tiling rocks with repeats; will I find an issue later with my normal map considering the size/resolution in contrast to the quantity of the rocks?

Wouldn't it be better if there was for example less rocks and thus more normal map space?

I just don't want to go back and redo all of this; it would be such a bother to make a texture go from 284 to say 50...

I.e. at the moment each rock won't have a huge amount of pixels

It all depends on the resolution the texture is going to be, and also what scale the texture will be in the environment. Ie: if that texture was gravel, the scale would be different than a stone wall.

Also keep in mind that sculpting 284 rocks properly takes a lot of time, if it is an exercise that's cool, but in production it may not be the most efficient thing to do.

Ultimately I think you could have this texture be a 1k map, and still read well.
(√284=16.85 thus a grid roughly of 16*16, so on average each rock would occupy about 64px of space on a 1k map) It could probably even work on a 512 if you have very chunky bevels on the edges.