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Basic - how to use Texturesheets

December 01, 2007, by Tapir.

Texturesheets are large sheets of separate textures combined into a single image to reduce draw calls and improve performance. Basically, they're a bunch of textures packed together in one images. Hakuryu recently released a texturesheet cheat sheet so that you can easily search the texturesheets for textures you like. The download page for the cheat sheet is: texturesheet cheat sheet.

Applying the texture

First you'll have to create the surface we'll put our texturesheet on. Create a big, square brush and assign any texture to it. In the example picture we created a 2048x3324 brush with the concrete01 texture. You should now have something that looks like this:

Select one of the faces of your brush's faces by using ctrl+shift+right-click in the camera window. Then press M to open the Media Browser and navigate to the texturesheets folder. We'll assign the texturesheets / valley / valley_wall6 texture to our brush. If you look at your camera window you'll notice that the select brush face is now textured using the selected texturesheet, but things look a bit weird. Because texturesheets contain multiple textures, you have to tell the editor which part of the texturesheet to use for your brush.

Selecting and aligning the texture

While keeping the textured face selected, open the Texture Editor window (shift+F2). You will see your selected texturesheet and a red box indicating what part of the texturesheet is being used.

Resize the red box so that it contains only the part of the sheet that you want to see on the brush. You can do this by moving the mouse over the edges of the box and dragging it with the mouse to make it bigger or smaller. Hold the right mouse button to drag the texture editor view around and the mouse wheel lets you zoom the view in and out.

Unstretching the texture

The good thing about texturesheets is that they tile horizontally. This means that you can make the brush as wide as you want, the texture will just repeat itself over and over again. This helps when 'unstretching' our texture.

Make sure you still have the textured face selected and press shift-f2 to open the Texture Editor. Now use the left mouse button and make the red box wider by dragging its right edge to the far right. Look at your camera window and you'll notice that the wall will start looking better as you make the red box wider. Continue dragging the red box until the wall looks good to you. A good rule of thumb is to make the red box about the same width as the selected brush/face. In our case the selected face is 3324 units long, so we made the red box 3324 units wide.

That's it! You should now know how to use texturesheets - play around with the texturesheets and try to texture the other sides of your brush. 

The cheat sheet Hakuryu released is a good help when trying to find appropriate textures. When possible, try to use many different parts of the same texture sheet, this helps to improve performance and memory usage. Texturesheets can be created using the Atlas Editor, which we'll explain in a future article.