Hi my community handle is phanjam and I help out modding games, mostly Torchlight 2. I offered to help another member make some tilesets for his TC mod. Then relaized i didnt know the first thing about tile-makeing for games :P can you suggest any reading materials please? Thanks a ton!
Sure thing, I would love to! If you need any more help, send me another PM and we can figure out a way for me to contact you to explain things further.
Firstly it depends on if you’ll need a normal map (most games do nowadays - but I’m not sure what Torchlight requires).
Personally I have access to Digital Tutors so first thing I generally do when I am looking for anything in particular is look there. But if you don’t have access to Digital tutors there are some good sites like Polycount (take a look at the wiki and the forums, so many questions get posted on the forums) there’s Tuts+, 3D Total, Youtube and Eat3D (to name a few).
If you want to work with Zbrush then there’s a nice tutorial “ZBrush TilingTextures WrapMode” by nickzucc on Youtube Video 1, Video 2, Video 3. It’s a maya to zbrush tutorial but if you know Blender or 3dsMax then you’ll be fine.
This is best for getting a normal map
Zbrush can be used for texturing as well
Zbrush has a tiling feature that is realtime (pretty cool - it does take some setup though)
Zbrush is sculpting so you can grab AO maps and Spec maps if you want to.
If you’re working on just diffuse (like I generally do) then you can just figure out how to use the Offset Filter for Photoshop. I do a few different layers so that I can see the basic layout it’s going to do. But this requires I make macros (Actions) in PS.
There are a few tutorials you can find online just by searching for tiliable textures in google.
The tiling is not real time (and it applies to one layer at a time)
Photoshop seems to be the only drawing program that has this ability
remember that you are working with textures so the texture sizes will need to be 2048, 1024, 512, 256, 128, 64 or 32
The videos I linked previously shows a very quick use of offset while customising maps
Here's a demo on how to use photoshop to create realistic textures from photos. (using a few of photoshop's features).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7XCEFSjRF8
http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-turn-a-texture-into-a-seamlessly-tiled-background--psd-1565 - If you prefer a written tutorial
I hope this helps and thanks for the question! keep making awesome art!
If you have a chance, I'd love to know more about modding for Torchlight, I really do enjoy that game and love the art style. Hit me up with guidelines and requirements. Or what you do specifically.