Qbasic: the Magazine
08.14.99
Issue 12

 

Art by Gavan

By Gavan

Welcome to the third art tutorial, written by…Me. This tutorial can be read independently of the previous two, although it is suggested that you read the others anyway, because they were written by Me (and you can pick up the conventions used in My tutorials). Is there a slight air of egotism in this article? =) This tutorial steps out of shading concepts and into the wonderful world of tiling. Tiles are (usually square) blocks of art that can be repititiously blitted to the game screen to make a world. The advantage to using tiles, as opposed to using very large bitmaps depicting entire areas, is that tiles take up much less space, and are easier to work with from a programming perspective (testing collision, for example).

The downside to tiles is that they are not entirely flexible, and the final product they represent tends to look "blocky" or repititious. There are several methods of tiling, but first it is necessary to learn seamless tiling, the root of tiling techniques. One thing to note in this tutorial is that some of the larger coordinate blocks are depicted with cyan borders for the purpose of simplicity.

 

A
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Mmm...examples =)

 
 

seamless tiling
For the purpose of making this tutorial less confusing (as if it were not confusing enough to begin with |-) ), I have divided the example bitmap into two parts: the first part shows the tiles used, the second part shows the tiles being tiled in a two by two square. I will distinguish between the two examples by using a prefix of "A" or "B" (the former refers to the first bitmap, the latter to the second) in front of the bitmap coordinates. That said, look at the asphalt tile in A(1,1). You can already tell this tile sucks =)…and sure enough, looking how it tiles in B(1,1), you can see that it is definitely not seamless.

What is that you ask, grasshopper? What is a seamless tile? A seamless tile is a bitmap that can be copied and placed repeatedly in an adjacent fashion such that the viewer can not tell where the origin of the original bitmap is. In simpler terms, a seamless tile, when tiled, has no visible edges. One bitmap should line right up with the next with no awkward lines between if it is seamless. Look at A(2,1) for an example of a seamless tile, and its tiled output in B(2,1).

Making a seamless tile can be very complex and frusterating, if you only use trial and error. However, a fairly simple trick can save you lots of work. I call it CAPEA, or "cut and paste edge alignment." It works like this: first, a tile is made, without regard to its seamlessness. Next it is cut in half horizontally…the upper half is place adjacently below the lower half. Then the edge between the two is "fixed," such that no seam appears in the currently visible tile. Then the lower half is placed in its original position, and the tile is cut vertically, the right half is placed adjacent to the other side of the left.

Finally, the seam between the left and right halves is fixed, and the right half is placed back in its original position. This process may seem awkward, but it is the single most efficient way I know of making a seamless tile. To clear things up a bit, I made two examples. In the first example A(1,2)-A(7,2), the goal was to create a checker pattern that would blend completely along the edges, but not the inside (which is rather redundant for a checker tile, but it was intended for an easily visualized example). The resulting tiling can be seen in B(3,1). In the second example A(1,3)-A(7,3), a (more real-world) random ellipse pattern was made; the goal of course, was to have it tile seamlessly.

This required, in some instances, slightly reshaping or resizing the ellipses. In the result B(4,1), there are several larger ellipses in the center of each tile…this results in a conspicuous pattern (the viewer can easily discern where each tile is, relative to the akward oval). In general, you will want to avoid making any sections of your tiles too different from other sections…no internal components of your tiles should be akwardly large, small, colored, or greatly varied in any other way from the rest of the tile components. I noticed in a certain game the bookshelf tile had a skull on it, next to several books. The skull did add a bit of atmosphere, but when I saw that every bookshelf in the game had the same skull on it…it made me wonder =). To make lots of jargon short, avoid this mistake.

blending tile regions
Knowing how to make a seamless tile is only the first step…what if you want to make one tile type blend with another type? This is particularly useful for terrain…say if you wanted your grass tiles to gradually fade to your sand tiles, or your rock tiles to your dirt tiles. We want to have tiles that fade in every direction, so we can create any possible shape (imagine trying to create a large, rectangular patch of grass on some sand: we would need pieces that fade to each of the four sides, and the four corners). So let us enumerate ALL possible transitions, so we can build any shape of transitions. This can be done with some simple block tricks…if we divide a tile into four quadrants, where each quadrant can be "on" (represented by black) or "off" (represented by any shade of red) (think binary =) ).

There are sixteen possible combinations…but we do not want the one that is completely blank (all quadrants off); after all, how useful is a blank tile? Subtracting one, this leaves us with fifteen possible combinations. If you align these possible combinations A(1,4), you can easily distinguish that they form four sides, four corners, four inverse corners, two touching corners, and a whole tile. This is the base set we want to use for creating tiles that shift from one tile type to another. From this set, we can create a blender mask, a mask that will dither your base tile set onto any type of terrain. To create a blender mask, simply fade the black dot region onto the red, using less and less frequent dot dithering, and do the opposite with the red region A(2,4). Then, once you have a base tile, you can just make fifteen copies of the tile and place this blender mask over it A(3,4), dropping out the black color as a transparency. Then only the red region has to be dropped out from the transitioning tiles when they are placed on top of other tiles, as shown in B(1,5). As difficult as I may have made that simple process seem, I guarantee that it works great, and is very easy once you create the blender mask…or you can even copy mine if you are lazy =).

 

More tiles for ya

 
 

(not so?) trivial corrections from previous issues
I would like to correct some explanations of techniques that I have now refined…the first is metallic shading for flat objects. A better way to do it is use streaked regions that fade from dark to light, and then back to dark again (like the gold ones in A(2,5). These regions are used in varied angles on each face of the object. The second technique that I want to correct is pseudo- refraction for flat faced objects…for each face, a random angle of the metallic shading described above should be used. Good examples of this are the jewels I ripped off of the DA2 border, shown in A(3,5).

More tips for making cool tiles

  • Like I've said before, avoid making any areas of your tile too different from the rest of the areas in the tile…unless…
  • …you make multiple versions of one type of tile. Let's take a brick-filled tile for example…you could have a large, awkward brick in one of the tiles, another tile be slightly normal, and another tile have some cracks in it. This way you could distribute the tiles randomly for a varied, not-so- bland-and-uniform environment.
  • Try as you might, you cannot shade an entire tile, because it will not tile correctly (unless you shade darkly on all sides with a highlight in the center, but damn that looks stupid). You can, however, shade components of a tile…take a cobblestone pavement tile for example. You can shade each individual cobblestone and still have the texture tile perfectly.
  • The food pyramid you always see on cereal is boxes BS…nobody can eat eleven servings of carbohydrates in a day…Its just a cheap ploy to get more cereal consumers on the market.
  • Don't run with scissors.

summary
This must be my most confusing, sloppy, and rushed article yet…so if you have any questions, feel free to email me at gavbug@napanet.net, or better yet, ICQ me at 17653643 (no authorization required). Just be so kind as to not ask about the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, or any crap like that =) Look out for the next article I will do (not necessarily next issue)…it goes into quantum mechanics and the theory of the fourth dimension; well, it does three dimensions, at least >8) .

Ask Gavan how you can seamlessly tile your blitted sprites at this address.

 

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