The assets which come with the game make use of materials with tiling textures. I can get Blender to render a material with a tiling texture, but I have been unable to get it to export to COLLADA with the tiling texture in place. In Blender I can make something that looks just fine by using "Object" or "Global" mapping and a material with a repeating texture. I can't figure out how to get it exported to COLLADA with those textures though. The material I find online for Blender->T3D seems to be saying to UV it. If I understand that correctly that would mean that we create a UV image and then bake the textures onto that. This will create huge images for something the scale of a bridge, wasting resources and running into size limits. For example, after looking at this thread and an accompanying demo video plus parts of this other video and checking this Blender hotkey cheatsheet I've gotten to the point where I can unwrap like the first demo video shows. I'm pretty sure that's not exactly what I should be doing here though. Hopefully I'm missing something obvious and simple. I guess I should have the same UV coordinates repeating many times, sort of like this person may have had happen accidentally? Links to existing tutorials, threads, etc would be great. I'd appreciate any advice.
Just use UV Unwrap your object with cube projection (works in most cases), and then assign it to use your tile-able texture. To get it show in renders, you will have to set mapping set on UVMAP.
Thanks Nadeox1. I tried that on a cube and on a random bunch of objects I "joined" in Blender as a test and it worked. Unfortunately it does not work on the model I made in Sketchup and tried moving over to Blender as DAE, FBX, 3ds, and OBJ. I guess Sketchup's output is too broken for this to work. I did try that UV projection before posting about it, but since I was trying it out on my Sketchup model which generates crazy results I assumed that it was the wrong tool for the job. I guess it's time to learn to build the same thing in Blender so that I can (hopefully) get the model to behave.
Hmm, actually now that I've toggled the "Scale to Bounds" checkbox the projection produces something about the same quality as what Sketchup produced. Maybe I just need to keep fiddling...
