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[DrainStudios]

Hello,

I wonder if there is a way to make the textures stop look like a big lined field if you scale it very high?
Actually even World of Warcraft has this problem, so is there even a way to "fix" this?

Here is an example (World of Warcraft) :


Here is an example (Hero) :


The problem is highly visible with our textures. (512x512 Photoshop .dds)

Thank you!

[HE-Cooper]

Welcome to texturing in video games.  Texture repetition is really just an outcome of the texture you make. But you can see with the stone texture in the first screen, that it's actually a very well done texture and is managing to hide most of the repetition itself. There is no "technical" fix in existence for this, as it would be like a technical fix for "how do I make my buildings look better".

Common practice is to break up visual repetition with either a second complimentary texture of a different pattern, interspersed with the first texture, or to use the same texture in different patches but scale the UV to different sizes. Almost all world building terrain textures are built in "sets" for this purpose, as its difficult to cover a large area with a single texture. You should also keep in mind what the common camera angle will be for your players and build your textures to suit that angle. But with some practice and experience you'll see that elbow grease and polish, using the first two suggestions will solve all of your problems.

[Bonkahe]

Since my HE server is still being set up, so I cant say exactly for hero engine, but while working with udk I found the best way to fix what you have is rotate the texture by 90 degrees any direction, and use a large seamless mask to blend the two, make sure that its a very gradual change from black to white on the mask, also change the size of the rotated texture (doesnt matter by how much, I found 1.25-2.5 to be the best.) and finally probably the best way to make the mask seamless you can just use the map-make seamless option on gimp (dunno how on photoshop, I assume there is a map on there to.)

[DrainStudios]

Welcome to texturing in video games.  Texture repetition is really just an outcome of the texture you make. But you can see with the stone texture in the first screen, that it's actually a very well done texture and is managing to hide most of the repetition itself. There is no "technical" fix in existence for this, as it would be like a technical fix for "how do I make my buildings look better".

Common practice is to break up visual repetition with either a second complimentary texture of a different pattern, interspersed with the first texture, or to use the same texture in different patches but scale the UV to different sizes. Almost all world building terrain textures are built in "sets" for this purpose, as its difficult to cover a large area with a single texture. You should also keep in mind what the common camera angle will be for your players and build your textures to suit that angle. But with some practice and experience you'll see that elbow grease and polish, using the first two suggestions will solve all of your problems.

Oh yes, i should have had this ideas too, but my technical artist isn't here at the moment, so i just asked here. I thought it could be possible that it is just a thing of configuration in the Hero Cloud Terrain Menu like scale etc.

Thank you anyway!

[HE-CHRISTOPHER]

The optimal solution is to resolve as much as you can within the texture itself...beyond that...

Textures are painted on "channels", each channel can be individually manipulated including modification of the UV scaling.  Tiling can be broken up through judicious application of an additional channel of texture (typically on a different layer) that reuses the same texture with the channel's parameters tweaked.  It is not recommended you add multiple layers of channels for every texture as that increases rendering cost, but it is appropriate to do so where the visual effect is worth the additional cost.

Using vertex painting and dynamic details to break up the visualization can contribute significantly to the impact of a scene.

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Terrain_panel

[HE-BENNETT]

I agree with Christopher and Cooper.

What you're noticing is an inescapable aspect of texture tiling. The best way to reduce it is through the art itself.  If you look at that screenshot from WoW, the problem is still present, but far less noticeable due how they have crafted the texture

Basically, having any big, easily identifiable features in the texture is bad.  The tiling will be very obvious.  In the WoW texture, the rocks are very small, with a lot per 'tile'. This allows the eye to easily get lost in the small details and not notice the tiling.

The distribution of color across the 'tile' should also be pretty even, for the same reason.

[Stadi_Thompson]

that is not a good tileable texture. also use normal maps that are different than the diffuse also helps. not an issue with hero, more a a poor decision of texture selection. look up the a photoshop tutorial on making tiled textures, you can improve the texture you are currently using with a few minor tweaks, that should give you what you are looking for.

[DrainStudios]

Very nice answer, thank you so much!

[DrainStudios]

Left (after) vs. Right (before) Very nice.

[HE-Cooper]

I would not recommend using 3 textures, especially if one of them is using alpha, as you are going to start to have performance problems if you do this all over. You really just need to practice and learn. Your goal should be to get a texture that doesn't look tiled. Then where you have to use the one texture in a wide open and visually unbroken space, paint in one of the alternate textures, or use the same texture but scale the UV in the editor.

First goal is to get a texture that looks the least tiled as possible. But think about how the real world looks (even if you aren't making a realistic looking game) there's nowhere, except maybe a desert, where the same texture, identically extended for hundreds of meters. There are subtle color changes, or places where the rock or grass is thinner and the underlying dirt or mud or rock shows through.

With 1 grass, 1 rock, and 1 dirt texture, that were all nicely done, and complimentary to each other, plus the ability to paint vertex color, an experienced world building could paint an entire region of a game to look great. Play around and you'll get the hang of it.

[DrainStudios]

Yeah, thanks for help.

I posted the before after comparison to show that the tutorial of Sarrene Grant is awesome 

[HE-HERB]

While there are more indepth and complicated books on game texturing, these are two suggested places to start.

The Dark Side of Game Texturing

3D Game Textures, Third Edition: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop

Cheers

[shadowfire]

Welcome to texturing in video games.  Texture repetition is really just an outcome of the texture you make. But you can see with the stone texture in the first screen, that it's actually a very well done texture and is managing to hide most of the repetition itself. There is no "technical" fix in existence for this, as it would be like a technical fix for "how do I make my buildings look better".

Common practice is to break up visual repetition with either a second complimentary texture of a different pattern, interspersed with the first texture, or to use the same texture in different patches but scale the UV to different sizes. Almost all world building terrain textures are built in "sets" for this purpose, as its difficult to cover a large area with a single texture. You should also keep in mind what the common camera angle will be for your players and build your textures to suit that angle. But with some practice and experience you'll see that elbow grease and polish, using the first two suggestions will solve all of your problems.

I concur with Cooper here.  In my practice run on making a test area and actually texturing it with multiple layers I used default textures.  Utilizing the dirt road path with an overlaid cobblestone texture as a bumpmap... due to these being different textures the cobblestones created ranomized bumping within the cracked dirt and thus blended and got rid of repetitions.

Granted these were using two already well made textures but by themselves they failed to do the job.. also I used i think it was bumps, diffusion, uv scale and specular to further randomize it.