Hi @jan.cosmigo and the @cosmigo community,
I’ve been on the texture team for https://westeroscraft.com/ since 2013 and recently began working on my own resource pack for Minecraft. I’ve been designing each texture tile as part of a large “tileset” in a Photoshop CS6 file that I slice into 32x32 sized tiles usable in Minecraft. I use Photoshop’s layer feature to add textural variation to tiles, the layer mask feature to make tile-tile transitions, and the fill/ adjustment layers to create color variants.
I often think of a tile’s texture as being a certain material, let’s say “bricks”, it’s color is the type of material, let’s say “red”, and then there is often the need to create small variations. So, I end up with having a base material that I progressively apply changes to, through which I create individual instances.
Unfortunately, Photoshop doesn’t have an understanding of this connection between tiles, and therefore I find myself having to copy tiles across the canvas. I need to remember when I change the base material to propagate all changes across my duplicated tiles, and creating variants means I have to copy it all again. This is becoming unwieldy.
I did a bit of research and learned that the Unreal Engine has a very extensive material editor that allows material instances with all bells and whistles. I’m not sure, however, that I will easily be able to export my tiles as PNG from UE, and that I like the overhead that having to do everything in the engine creates.
I was wondering if there was already a way of doing this in Pro Motion, or if it could benefit from a feature like that.
Best regards,
Thamus_Knoward
Nice lookin’ brick tiles!
Tiling in Photoshop is a nightmare because it’s never had any semblance of tiling support. I often get by with making arrays of smart objects, but it’s rather cumbersome.
This is exactly what initially drove me to start using Pro Motion.
Pro Motion has had very solid tiling support for over a decade.
Most of what you want to do you can do in Pro Motion, via tilemaps, layers, and blendmodes.
However, there is no layer masking in Pro Motion, unfortunately.
There is also no adjustment layers for live hue shifts, etc.
Hi @Thamus_Knoward,
there is no material editor and as Mathias said there is no layer mask. Also you need to know that all pixel colors would be limited to a 256 color palette. But this should not be a problem because these palette colors would only be required by the initial layer defining the base brick pixels. All blending etc. would work with true color and the resulting image data could also be saved as true color without being reduced to 256 colors.
I would like to play around with a sample. Could you provide maybe that brick file and send it to jan@cosmigo.com? Will be treated confidential of course.
-Jan
@mathias thanks for the compliment! Yeah, I tried out smart objects ages ago, but its painful. To get a texture to tile I use filter > other > offset and I suppose a bit of experience but that too is a lot of trial and error.
Layer masking and adjustment layers are a thing of beauty. I use them everywhere and find them one of the most compelling reasons to even use Photoshop for this kind of editing in the first place. Are there equivalent workarounds in Pro Motion?
@jan.cosmigo Interesting, I wasn’t aware of the color limit. I suppose I’m a very unique use case here using a completely unrestricted palette in my resource pack. Most other artists apply strict palettes so I very much understand this limitation.
I’m super happy to hear that you’d like to play around with this concept! I’ll send you all the individual PNGs!
