Best way to use a tiling texture for one part of a model only?

Carabiner · Oct 2014

Noob question:

So I made a model of a house in Maya, and it's all unwrapped and UV laid out. I've been working on texturing it now that it's in-engine. However, when I did the UV mapping I just laid out everything so that it's unique, which I'm realizing isn't an efficient use of space. That's because the walls (which are mapped on top of each other, so it's just one texture, but still) take up a TON of real estate that I could/should be dedicating to unique textures like the door.

Here's a link that shows my WIP model (have since made some more progress there), plust the UV map.

This brings me to my question. I know how to set up tiling for a whole material, but I'm not sure how to do it for just a wall. What's the best way to accomplish this? Do I need to create a new material and apply it to just the wall, and tell the engine to reference a specific part of the UV map?

(I may have just answered my own question, but I want to make sure I'm using best practices.)

Thanks in advance!

Obscura · Oct 2014

You can do two things. One would be to assign a second material to your walls, and using a tiling texture in it. The second option is to make a mask texture for the walls, and using it as a alpha of a linear interpolate which would lerp between the tiling texture, and your current texture. The second solution would create one less draw call.

Best way to use a tiling texture for one part of a model only?

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