Painter Tiling Texture

jth852

Hey guys.  So I'm a little unsure of exactly how to explain my question so I apologize for any confusion in advance.  I was wondering about the quality of a tiled texture applied to a surface in Substance Painter.  For example say you have a flat surface and you want to make a wall out of it with a tiling texture.  Normally I would make the uvs of the mesh match the tiling texture and then scale the uv shell up past 0,1 space to tile the texture.  How would the quality compare if instead, I kept the uvs in 0,1 space, imported the mesh into substance painter and applied the texture as a fill layer, tiled it the appropriate amount of times and exported the final textures from that? I would assume youre cutting down on the quality but I'm not sure.

leleuxart

It's the same exact thing. Whether you're tiling by scaling up the UVs, tiling in Painter, or tiling in your engine, unless you project in world-space, the tiling is all done in UV space. 

jth852

@leleuxart Thanks for the feedback.  I'm still a little confused about the texture resolution of what you see on the final mesh. 

so hers just a standard plane with UVs filling up (0,!) space


and here the UV is scaled up to tile.  Then I drew on top to kinda clarify my question with a visual aid


is the resolution of what you see rendered clamped to the resolution of the texture (ex. 1k, 2k etc,), or are you seeing extra resolution for every thing past the (0,1) uv space?  I feel like it would look better if it was the latter, but wouldn't that be pretty heavy on a game engine if you tile a texture a lot across the surface?

jth852

Okay so after a bit of research I figured out, i think.  Feel free to contradict me if anyone sees this and its wrong.  So the amount of texture resolution on a mesh is refereed to as the texel density.  The amount of texel density a mesh should have should be compared to real world measurements to maintain an even density across multiple pieces of an environment.  So if you want everything in a project to have 1k pixel resolution per square meter of a mesh, you stretch the UVs of each piece to have a have a texture tile the appropriate amount of times to reflect that ratio when rendered.  The resolution applied to a mesh increases when the uvs stretch past the (0,1) space, allowing you to create a high resolution asset for a project.  And that texel resolution is kept in check (so not to be to heavy to render) by sticking to a ratio of how many pixels per meter you want on the final meshes.