tile sets

[theHeretic]

I'm curious how people create tilesets? I have done a little researching, but the link for a tutorial for "textures" that looked good was broken.
All I know is the general color, and I have no idea how to get started making one of these. Any suggestions?

[theHeretic]

Like, I made this (much less blurry though)... and it kinda sucks.
http://i.imgur.com/TbXxRIp.png

[r1k]

this a program called pyxeledit which is made for creating tilesets.  You can toggle a grid on and off, and when you draw something with a tile you can mark it as a tile and then place it across the canvas.  Then whenever you edit one instance of that tile all the others are edited too.  That makes it useful to test tilability and such.  It has a bunch of other features too.

IF you dont want your tiles to look too obviously like tiles, it could help to begin by sketching out a room and then breaking it into tiles as you go.  Having a grid over your sketch helps for this, as does the tiling options.

[theHeretic]

I can make them tile. I you assume 1/4 of what I made is where the problem is, I don't understand how you go from a single-color square to a decent looking stone/wood floor/wall... And I'm trying to figure out how.

[Ai]

Draw what you see, don't make up details. If you don't have a ref, get one (in the average city locale, there are plenty of different rocky surfaces to see, looking at paths, front yards, houses..) . Just identify the patterns in the real life texture you are looking at, and pick out some to work into your tile. Start from broad, approximate blobs of light and refine them towards clean shapes.
If you do have a ref, creating an halfway-recognizable image based upon it is just a matter of hard work and decisionmaking.

EDIT: I just threw this (and these) together, by way of demonstrating to myself that what I said is actually true. Ref: paving in my front yard.

[theHeretic]

I tried that with pictures from google and it actually worked better then I expected. Got a really nice looking wood floor (in my opinion) but my wood floor looks to highly tiled for me. I'll probably redraw it but thanks for helping me understand the basic concept.

However, what do you do if pictures don't exist of what you want to make?

[Ai]

That's why you need to get good at the construction side of art too. Understanding perspective, drafting, pattern, value/light.. these are the skills that let you make up stuff that still makes sense. You always benefit from a ref though -- if you think of the ref as a recipe, you can leave a lot of the elements out for different effect, but the point of it is to remind you what the 'ingredients' of rock, or eyes, or .. etc are, so you can include the parts that seem fitting.

Moatdd's 5-part series on "digital painting basics" gives a good overview of the very basics of each of these areas of art. (It is in no way limited to digital painting, digital painting is just the way he chooses to demonstrate these principles)

As for the 'tileyness', it helps to use a good editor that supports tiles well. For example all the images in the gallery I linked were done from a black 48x48 canvas with GraFX2 (ie. enough space for a 3x3 grid of 16x16 tiles); I set the grid size to 16x16 and enabled Tilemap mode. When I draw anywhere, all of the tiles are updated to match. In this situation it is easy to spot any 'tileyness' since you always see the tile tiled with itself in all possible directions. Fixing tileyness generally comes down to offsetting part of the tile (think of a brick wall, how consecutive rows of bricks are not lined up but staggered.) or reducing the amount of straight horizontal/vertical edges.