Seamless textures for tile sets

Ashervisalis

Not really an Allegorithmic specific question, but I am using Designer and Painter for texturing.

I've just been assigned to creating tile sets (modular environment pieces) for a Skyrim mod I'm working on. I'll be creating stairs, walls, hallways, rooms, pits, etc. I'm lost as to how people make tile sets like these, with 20+ pieces, and have the textures align when piecing them together.

Please note: The Skyrim engine needs to have assigned maps for each piece, so it can't be like in UE4 where you just assign the texture based upon world coordinates.

Any workflow tips and instructions are more than appreciated. Thanks!

Zalek4

 Hi there!

I'm actually working on a similar project in terms of modular environment pieces and I just figured this problem out yesterday.

First, read this if you haven't yet:

https://80.lv/articles/textel-density-tutorial/

The concept is essential to accomplishing what you're trying to do. 
Once you've got your texel density figured out, then you can start making environment pieces. Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this next part as I'm pretty new to this pipeline too.

Let's say your texel density is 10,24 px/cm. This means you're going to be displaying 1024 pixels (1k map) per 1 meter of an object the texture is applied to. For most objects, this means that the UVs will be much larger than the 1/1 UV space. I'm using tiling textures to fix that problem.

Also, if I understand correctly, objects will only tile correctly with the same density if they are a whole number length. What I mean is, if you're displaying a 1k tiling texture every 1 meter like I am in the following pictures, then the objects you've assigned them to have to have a width that stays in whole meters (1 meter, 2 meters, 3 meters, not anything like 2.34 meters). This ensures seamless tiling.

Make sure the displayed faces of your meshes are closest to the origin during UV-ing. Otherwise, the textures won't tile correctly either.

For example:

The right wall piece does not have its front face at the origin:


The right wall piece does have it's front face at the origin.


I hope I didn't just confuse you more!

Ashervisalis

@Zalek4 Thanks for the reply! I won't have any issues with tiling walls and floors and the like. I'm kinda more wondering about if I have a 1x1 meter hallway which needs to transition into a 7x4 room. I think I'm just going to need to break the pieces down into more simple pieces and go from there. Wish me luck!