Can I tile only one section of a D-map?

[Zotter]

Not sure whether this would be pulled off in max or in the engine, though I figure in the engine, which we are using unity for the iphone. After putting multiple tiled textures on a larger diffuse to keep draw calls down, back in the geometry I would just copy & move the planes, for this example we'll say the ocean plane, so that the ocean would be made of multiple planes instead of one big tiled plane.

texture layout
http://i525.photobucket.com/albums/cc331/zottah/uv_layout_plain.jpg

example of uvs laid out over the texture, each blue square represents a plane's uv coordinates.
http://i525.photobucket.com/albums/cc331/zottah/uv_layout_uvs.jpg

This worked fine until now at the crunch we're going through and figuring out what geometry we could do without to help the frame rate as much as possible and having 8 pieces of ocean planes to make one ocean seems a little over the top.

Question is, is it possible to tile the texture on that ocean piece without it showing any other part of the diffuse map so I can just have one large plane for the ocean and just tile within that plane's uv coordinates. If not I figure I'll have to go back and break the diffuse map into multiple separate textures, though I'm a little reluctant to do that since we're trying to keep the draw calls down.

Though I figure we're going to have to favor either geometry or textures one way or the other.


Thanks!

[pior]

add edges on your geo wherever you want to loop the texture ...

[DKK]

Yeah, Just cut the geometry where you want it to tile and then slap it into the same UV space. theres a great webpage that explains the few different ways to do tiling textures, ill try and dig it up.

[sama.van]

And about the iphone do not separate the uvs...
As they said you can cut but keep connected the uvs together... or the number of vertex will be not cute here :)


You can see an example I done with Unity here about the UVS//vertex number conflict :
http://samavan.com/divershelp/Test_TriangleStrip_Cube_A001.jpg


And here another example similar to your texture I done for iphone too for reducing the number of call to.... one.... :D:D
http://samavan.deviantart.com/art/iPhone-Shuriken-Game-2-145376053

[fantasymaster]

Just rotate the 4 squads in 180 deg. and squash them a litle bit, so they can tile vertical.

[MightyPea]

Yeah, if polycount is a concern, get rid of that part on the left and scale your pieces up so it fills up the texture. It will then tile from left to right

[Mark Dygert]

Yep, or take the vertical piece and rotate it 90 degrees so it will fit horizontally, then squish vertically the other pieces and stretch them horizontally a bit and add the new piece to the top or the bottom.

[warby]

fantasy master and vig are on to the right solution here
thats the way i would do it !
and you should design future texture sheets in that manner as well !

[Zotter]

Absolutely! Thanks to all for the great advice, I definitely agree that this should be taken into account early on. Considering the time limits and the need for all materials on the texture I think they'll have to stay for now, but next time, design around that for sure.

The best solution for the time we have, is to have the ocean quads be one large plane cut up to at least cut the pieces up but leave and the uvs them attatched at least cutting down on the vert count.

I definitely think that just taking the vertically stacked part on the left and joining making it horizontal like the rest of the pieces would be the way to go on something like this in the future, but for time sake just changing the tile pieces would be most fastest.

I know quick isn't good but with the deadline looming and lots of more pressing matters it's quickly becoming a pick and choose scenario.

Being my first job and the only artist on the team I probably should have taken this matter to the board earlier. There's been a lot I've learned throughout this project (a lot by mistake) as I assume any production cycle is like, I guess as long as the lesson is retained it's nothing too much wasted (I hope :D ).