how do you create tilable textures for uneven floor tiles not all the same dimensions?

cturbo

How do you go about making floor tiles when the dimensions of the building are odd  which leaves me with some of the tiles not fitting and stick out and you have to fit along a curved wall? What is the best texturing software and method i shoud use? Do i trim those bits that stick out of the building exterior and bake those bits separately?? I was looking at the trim sheet method but im not sure if it will work if i have uneven tiles which are not the same dimensions?? There are other methods substance designer or 3d sampler to create seamless pattern, but not sure what will work as im all new to this and would appreciate someoone whos amazing to give me advice so i can learn. The tiles are 1m squared. Thank you

okidoki

This is properly not what you want to hear (and i mentioned it at one of your other threads).. but: you should have stick to the grid in the first place or planning ahead with some 1x1 m and 1x1.5 m tiles (or even more) which "do tile" (which is also more complicated than respecting the grid)  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

cturbo

yes I did stick to the grid and i didnt think about the floor at the time , and the building i am creating has curved walls so i imagine there must be a process for it as not everything is straight right anglles in the real world. I have done different tile sizes so it fits (rectangle or square as you advised 150 x 150 or 100 x 75, 150 x 75.) Can i make the tiles triangle too where the curve is?

I think ill be using substance designer to tile my own floor material, it seems to be more effective for the job.

Alex_J

cover as much as you can with your standardized pieces

then when you are finished, look at see where the gaps are. hopefully there is some pattern to the left overs and you can easily fill the gaps with just a few more standardized pieces. if not, just make custom things as you need.

other methods can be to use props and trims to cover problem spots, and world-projected textures rather than UV aligned textures, and and depending on the art style and textures it might not be a problem in the first place - for example a noisy pattern might not stand out as being off, while a wood planks might.

Fabi_G

Are you looking to generate different diners? Else you could just create a unique floor mesh and apply a tiling material, done

cturbo

Thanks guys, I am doing that now, it was great to have your help and options. Im only generating one diner floor, and everything fits and im just aligning those cornors to the grid to stop it poking out. One other question do i repeat the same process for the floor exterior of the bulding, e.g create floor tiles that follow the buildings curve too? Do we still bake at 8bit or has it gone up to 16bit maps yet?

okidoki

Ohh you really want to make the geometry fit.. why not "just" overlap the tiles ?

Alex_J

bake 16bit textures and 8 bit and see if there is a visible difference. if no difference, go with what is lighter. keep a save file of your baking setup right before you bake, just in case you learn something new in the future and decide you want a different size texture, then you can easily do so.

as for outside pieces, i'm not personally aware of any situations that would call for making floor pieces that are custom fit to a build or anything like that. i think 99% of the time, people are just overlapping geo and you use some props to cover the transition between foreground and background.

when doing your work, think about if a model you are making has broad reuse, or if it is "custom" meaning it can only be used in one or a few places. if it has broad reuse, that is efficient and you should try to cover the majority of your levels with those high efficiency models. if you are finding that you need custom models, that is low efficiency and so you make best use of time to put that sort of thing off as long as you can, on account that the level may change many times for many reasons - therefore "premature optimization" is the root of all evil (meaning it contributes to wasted time and energy )

ZacD

cturbo said:

Do we still bake at 8bit or has it gone up to 16bit maps yet?

Normal maps get compressed with BC5 compression where it wont make much of a difference, but baking at 16 bit and lowering it down to 8 bit later can produce dithering and noise instead of obvious banding artifacts where there's strong gradients. Doesn't really matter much unless there's really low roughness values. 

poopipe

Baking 8 bit normal maps has never been a good idea

Unless the engine you're targeting is very silly indeed you want to be feeding it 16bit textures for everything (outside of special cases where you want 32bit) - UE5 support for 16bit color maps is acceptable (vs the abortion it was in UE4) so there's no excuse there   

cturbo

poopipe said:

Baking 8 bit normal maps has never been a good idea

Unless the engine you're targeting is very silly indeed you want to be feeding it 16bit textures for everything (outside of special cases where you want 32bit) - UE5 support for 16bit color maps is acceptable (vs the abortion it was in UE4) so there's no excuse there   

Alex_J said:

bake 16bit textures and 8 bit and see if there is a visible difference. if no difference, go with what is lighter. keep a save file of your baking setup right before you bake, just in case you learn something new in the future and decide you want a different size texture, then you can easily do so.

as for outside pieces, i'm not personally aware of any situations that would call for making floor pieces that are custom fit to a build or anything like that. i think 99% of the time, people are just overlapping geo and you use some props to cover the transition between foreground and background.

when doing your work, think about if a model you are making has broad reuse, or if it is "custom" meaning it can only be used in one or a few places. if it has broad reuse, that is efficient and you should try to cover the majority of your levels with those high efficiency models. if you are finding that you need custom models, that is low efficiency and so you make best use of time to put that sort of thing off as long as you can, on account that the level may change many times for many reasons - therefore "premature optimization" is the root of all evil (meaning it contributes to wasted time and energy )

cturbo

Thanks so much that's really useful to know. I am worry about Z-fighting which i have been informed about with overlapping geo. When the SM_cube in unreal touches the floor plane tiles its Z-fighting and I watched a video on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGysjCct_TQ and it advised to move the sm_cube down or move it away, but when i move the cube down i obviously get a big gap between the base of the building and the floor and it doesn't make sense to move the cube away cause that's my base for the interior and exterior, and that's why i questioned how do i build the exterior to get around zfighting. I would love to create a Californian desert environment, and I am struggling to understand how the environments are built to avoid this z-fighting with textures.  Also, how do they make the glass? When i create a plane its invisible on the other side and i want to see the window inside and outside, so do they use two planes, or just solid geo and apply glass texture or is there an option to make a plane double sided to optimize it for games so you see the backside too?

Alex_J

z fighting will be seen when two parallel planes are very close together. you wont see it where less than parallel planes intersect. so you can have the ground intersect with buildings and you will not see zfighting there.

in general you'll be best off to not try and solve problems until you have directly encountered them yourself. if you hear about some problems indirectly and then try to prevent them before you actually understood them directly, you'll likely create more problems for yourself in the process of trying to work around something you don't actually understand.