Level Design in Maya

achillesian

Hullo thar, i've been messing around with unity some and trying to make some environments here and there. Complex shapes within a level (statues, torches) typically need their own texture maps and uv layout. However the bigger flat areas where I want simple tiling, tile floors, walls, ceilings can share the same uv space. In this uv space for the simple areas how do devs make things tile easily. In UDK for the basic walls you can just create a primitive within udk and then click a wall, click a texture, adjust how much it tiles and your done. Is there a way to do this in maya using polygons. (i think nurbs pretty much have the same workflow as dropping a texture on something in udk)

so basically i want things to tile on big flat planes, without having to make the texture tile in another program, without making redundant faces to force it to tile, and i want to do it within maya.

possible, yes or no?

Gallows

As long as the texture itself is tile-able, just model out your plane, assign whatever shader you need, and open the shader attributes. Then the box to the right of color, click that. Choose the file texture type and load your texture. Then in your hypershade you should be able to find a place2dtexture box within the hierarchy, double click it. Then set your repeat UV's to your liking. Keep your ratio together. (I.E- Shift 1.0 x 1.0 to 4.0 x 4.0 and so on.)

Hopefully this is what you needed, but I could be wrong.

oglu

i would recommend scale up the uvs on the faces you want to tile...
cause most engine could read it...

achillesian

thanks gallows, that is pretty much what i wanted, to do this each plane i use a tiling texture with has to be a separate object, is that pretty common practice?

Also i have to match the repeat uv's ratio to the ratio of the rectangle, thats pretty easy to eyeball though

thanks

MoP

What's wrong with using Mapping -> Planar or Mapping -> Automatic? Then just set the scale in the mapping node properties. No need to mess around with tiling scale in the material (since that might adversely affect other stuff with that texture applied).

achillesian

if i do that mop dont i have to tile the tiling texture manually in another program? which could be tough if i dont know the length width ratio of the plane i'm using, this way i can have one tiling texture, that several planes with different attributes are pointing to, so i can have a 2x4 plane and a 6x1 plane using the same texture space (and tiling properly) because of setting that repeat uv's accordingly for each one.

This also saves space because i could have a nicely detailed 128^2 diff and bump, and tile it alot so it looks like a nice big 1024^2

by the way, is there a performance difference between 128^2 times 8 and 1024^2 ? I know one is smaller to load into ram, but rending wise is one faster than the other?