Tiling and over-riding the detail textures...
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Tiling and over-riding the detail textures...
I did search but I have found 0 actuall guides on tiling also, how exactly does one specify a detail texture.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Gorm really needs to update the wiki, most of what I know I learned from reading literally hundreds of comments he made in threads...
Essentially tiling is the process of making the spring map compiler find as many like areas of texture as possible. Tiles don't have to be aligned to any specific grid, but they do need to match all the other corrisponding tiles perfectly. What you want to do is find a large grass field, or the bottom of an ocean, or any other area where you have alot of similar terrain that terregen just fills with similar colored plasma clounds (randomly generated texture). You can fill an entire area with a single 32x32 tile, but it will probably end up looking really really ugly. I would recommend either creating serveral 32x32 tiles and randomizing the order they get pasted, or just working with a much larger tile, 96x96 can work well for filling smaller feilds where you will only see the repeat 3-4 times in any direction, but bigger then that you either want to go for a larger tile or the random system. The random system has the advantage of looking better in massive spaces because it doesn't look like a repeating pattern on the minimap or overview, but it's harder to create 6 individual 32x32 tiles that all tile properly then it is to create one 128x128 tile. If your whole map is only one texture it's probably too ugly to worry about anyways, people won't download it even if it is small.
Do you need specific information on acctually creating a tile? There should be some tile creation texturing guides available around the internet. "Tile" in relation to texturing should be a fairly common term that google should pick up easily enough. If you think you need more help I'll work up a quick tile creation tute for GIMP... but the principle is exactly the same for PS. I learned most of my 2D imaging stuff for gimp from photoshop tutorials acctually.
Essentially tiling is the process of making the spring map compiler find as many like areas of texture as possible. Tiles don't have to be aligned to any specific grid, but they do need to match all the other corrisponding tiles perfectly. What you want to do is find a large grass field, or the bottom of an ocean, or any other area where you have alot of similar terrain that terregen just fills with similar colored plasma clounds (randomly generated texture). You can fill an entire area with a single 32x32 tile, but it will probably end up looking really really ugly. I would recommend either creating serveral 32x32 tiles and randomizing the order they get pasted, or just working with a much larger tile, 96x96 can work well for filling smaller feilds where you will only see the repeat 3-4 times in any direction, but bigger then that you either want to go for a larger tile or the random system. The random system has the advantage of looking better in massive spaces because it doesn't look like a repeating pattern on the minimap or overview, but it's harder to create 6 individual 32x32 tiles that all tile properly then it is to create one 128x128 tile. If your whole map is only one texture it's probably too ugly to worry about anyways, people won't download it even if it is small.
Do you need specific information on acctually creating a tile? There should be some tile creation texturing guides available around the internet. "Tile" in relation to texturing should be a fairly common term that google should pick up easily enough. If you think you need more help I'll work up a quick tile creation tute for GIMP... but the principle is exactly the same for PS. I learned most of my 2D imaging stuff for gimp from photoshop tutorials acctually.
How to specify your own detail tex.
[MAP]
{
Description=Honey I shrunk the game;
TidalStrength=20;
Gravity=150;
MaxMetal=0.05;
ExtractorRadius=200;
MapHardness=1000000;
DetailTex=layout03.bmp;
[ATMOSPHERE]
{
etc...
There quite few ways of creating tiles and randomizing them enough to hide repeats.
Make new grey image 32 times smaller than your texture add noize to it, then max the contast to make it black and white. Next pixel resize up to the same as your texture and create mask from it.
A little blur or edge diffussion in the mask at this point helps quality at the cost of final size but the right amount is worth the price.
Use it as a mask between similar but different textures, you can mix multiple patterns multiple ways to create final textures with very few obvious repeats.
[MAP]
{
Description=Honey I shrunk the game;
TidalStrength=20;
Gravity=150;
MaxMetal=0.05;
ExtractorRadius=200;
MapHardness=1000000;
DetailTex=layout03.bmp;
[ATMOSPHERE]
{
etc...
There quite few ways of creating tiles and randomizing them enough to hide repeats.
Make new grey image 32 times smaller than your texture add noize to it, then max the contast to make it black and white. Next pixel resize up to the same as your texture and create mask from it.
A little blur or edge diffussion in the mask at this point helps quality at the cost of final size but the right amount is worth the price.
Use it as a mask between similar but different textures, you can mix multiple patterns multiple ways to create final textures with very few obvious repeats.
Shot from another project:
I am actually quite familiar with photoshop... so as far as generating texture goes... I have that covered.
Anyway, what I wanted to know is it seems like this "tilling" I was reading about required files outside of my main texture map. For example, in the image above I have a LARGE area of cobblestone. Is is possible to generate a tesselating 32X32 image and via the usage of a masking file apply it? Or would I need to simply "fill" an area with a pre-made tile?
If it is a fill method, does the tile need to be sitting on a certain grid? if it is more like the masking method(similar to texture splattering) what does that entail?
I am actually quite familiar with photoshop... so as far as generating texture goes... I have that covered.
Anyway, what I wanted to know is it seems like this "tilling" I was reading about required files outside of my main texture map. For example, in the image above I have a LARGE area of cobblestone. Is is possible to generate a tesselating 32X32 image and via the usage of a masking file apply it? Or would I need to simply "fill" an area with a pre-made tile?
If it is a fill method, does the tile need to be sitting on a certain grid? if it is more like the masking method(similar to texture splattering) what does that entail?
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Nope. The spring map compiler searches through every 32x32 section on the map, and any it finds to store the same data it loads the location for and saves the texture segment in the same place on compression. Therefore if you have more textures that tile in 32x32 you get smaller map sizes. They don't need to aligned to a grid or anything, they just need to be identical to other 32x32 regions on your map.
[Edit] From what I understand the new new map format that buggi is building sharpmap for should work based on an advanced tessling system. It should be really interesting.
[Edit] From what I understand the new new map format that buggi is building sharpmap for should work based on an advanced tessling system. It should be really interesting.
Last edited by SwiftSpear on 21 Jan 2006, 08:03, edited 1 time in total.