[blowfish]

I'd love to see a texturing system where you can lay out tile textures on your model, then have it uvmap the model and apply the tile textures to the UV map as they are applied to the corresponding polygon in the model (sorry if I'm not explaining this well).  This would make making efficient models SOOOOOO much easier.  Actually, it would be nice if it did it so that you could save the uncompiled map (what i mean is that it saves how to lay out the textures on a 2d mesh, but doesn't compile them into an image), so that changing the texture, making glowmaps, retexturing, etc would be easier.

[blowfish]

Well, what do people think of this idea.  Is it practical?

[Nuke]

i think it would look like crap.

[blowfish]

Why?

If done correctly it would be indistinguishable from the tile-textured original.

[Hellstryker]

I think it's a great idea, not sure about it being practical however 

[Vasudan Admiral]

Unless really, really well done, tile texturing looks pretty ugly compared to even an average UV mapped custom texture. The only advantage such a tool would be that you could make texture tiled ships more efficient.

Anyway, what you're describing can be done via texture baking. It's possible (but tricky) to do it in blender by having two simultaneous UV sets for the one model. The first UV would be the texture tiled set (ie, you open the texture tiled model), and you would then have a second set where you have unwrapped the model as though you were going to create a custom texture.

Setting the tiled set to the active UV set and the custom unwrapped set to the render UV set, you can bake the textures (and ambient occlusion) from the first set onto the layout you unwrapped. Ie, it will draw your tiled textures onto the layout you've specified.

This method lets you have some control over the layout of the final baked texture, whereas usually a baked texture map will just auto-unwrap all faces onto the texture area, leaving you with something that looks a bit like a jigsaw puzzle of individual faces. That kind of thing is almost impossible to practically edit in a 2d app afterwards.

[blowfish]

Something like this really wouldn't be practical without a custom app to do it I think.  Firstly, because of shinemaps and glowmaps and also because of reskins.

[Nuke]

i refuse to use tiles on anything smaller than a destroyer myself. you need to do uv mapping manually, i dont think a single auto-uv mapping solution has ever worked. id rather programmers spend more time improving uv mapping tools to help expedite workflow, that waste time on a shortcut for losers. i think they call that reinventing the square wheel. if you want your model to look good, you have to do the work. even a high poly model can be uv mapped in a few hours. my longest uv map job, for the ragnarok class took 2 days, mainly because of all the bevels, but the ship looks awesome.

[Raven2001]

If im getting blowfish's idea correctly, its already possible to do via texture baking. Pretty much what VA described. Dunno about blender, but in Max you can bake pretty much (Diffuse, A. Occ., Spec, etc) everything as long as you have the appropriate stuff material wise.

Gotta disagree with Nuke though. Such a technique is a workflow speeder. Granted if you leave the texture like that, it will look like crap. But if done right, it gives you a decent base texture to work with

[Nuke]

baking causes some severe quality loss over a photo shopped texture. if a high end graphics program like max cant deal with baking without quality loss, i don't think a hackish homebrew uv mapper would do it any better. especially when you plan to use normal mapping. you would have broken seams all over the place where the seams are not contiguous. it might get a project out the door faster, but at the severe cost of inefficient and ugly graphics. texture creation workflow can be streamlined with the use of presets, tillable fill patterns, custom brushes and decals. i have a brush for everything from rivits to caution tape, as well as logos and such. but it still depends on having good uv projections.

[blowfish]

I see no reason why texture baking (if done correctly) would produce sub-par results.

[Nuke]

my problem isnt with baking in itself, if done with pre existing mapping it can look just as good as the original map with any special effects added in. my problem is with the automatic uv mapping, which makes hideously inefficient use of texture space. ive seen many attempts at automatic uv mapping in various modeling programs, and none of it has ever worked very well. id love having an automatic uv mapping algorithm that can generate results that would be both normal map friendly and as good as manual uv mapping. i like the idea but i don't see how you can pull it off when even high end modeling programs fail.

[Hellstryker]

Oh no, look what happened now:

[blowfish]

[Droid803]

lol...nice.