Seamless texturing - Tomb-Raider-Level-Editor/Tutorials GitHub Wiki

Written by Lwmte

You already heard something about "seamless texturing" in TE, but never fully understood what it means and how it works? This is tutorial for you!

First off, let's try to understand what's exactly a texture seam in TRLE world. There are lots of cases when there is a big texture (e.g. 256x256) which is split into many smaller pieces (let's say 64x64) and applied to adjacent faces:

However, if level was built with classic TRLE or NGLE, the texture won't look as a whole in such cases, and you will see these ugly seams:

Why it happens? There are two reasons. First, because of very ineffective texture management, Tomb Raider engines used very ugly way of texture mapping correction which cropped half of the pixel from every side of every texture. Second, when level is compiled, bigger textures which contain smaller ones are split and kept separately. Tomb Editor is capable of handling both of these issues. First one is resolved using texture padding level setting (you can read about it here). Second one may require some work from level designer's side, and here I will explain how to do it.

There are 2 different scenarios you can end up with. First scenario - you are texturing using grid paint or group texturing tools. For this case, you don't need extra steps, because Tomb Editor internally manages such cases. Second scenario - you already have a project where you have split bigger textures which were applied separately. Let's take stock Karnak project as example, since it contains a lot of big textures which are split into smaller parts. To fix it, you need these steps:

Step 1: Create a dummy room in your level or go to any room which is unreachable to Lara or camera. In Karnak example, I will just navigate to Room 2:

Step 2: Now, manually select every big texture and apply it to any face. Repeat this step for every big texture which is split to several smaller ones in your level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cCoYXwO97g

Sadly, TR engines have a limit on maximum texture size, which is 256x256. If you have textures which span beyond 256x256 limit, you can't completely fix it, and seams will appear on areas which span beyond 256x256 limit. Hopefully, Tomb Engine will alleviate this issue and increase maximum texture size to 2048x2048.

That's it! Now try to compile your level and you will see that seams are magically fixed!

You may mirror adjacent textures to maintain "continuity" between tiles. This is trivial action, and seamless texturing will also work in such case.