Some practical upscaling of Ace to MV/MZ tiles #2 - on some nearly tiling stuff

じ☆ve冰风

Welcome back to how to upscale certain VX/Ace tiles to MV/MZ while still having them look good.
Please readthe first one before you continue, cause I don’t wanna write down the same basics every single time ;D
They are a little less general than my usual tutorials, but then again, they show how I'd solve specific problems on the fly.

For the start, we are looking at this roof:



one could think, oh, the width of the planks will make the conversion quite easy, since they can stay as is and we just have more of them. But that horizontal bar might become a problem for tiling vertically, so let’s find out together!



Here is how the tile looks with the basic “just map the right size” upscaling method I introduced last time. But there are issues we cannot ignore:



If we try to map a larger area, the vertical loop is completely messed up!
That is for a simple reason:



If you use a 24x24 grid, you need those two areas to be able to line up. the upper 24px need to be able to connect to the lower ones and the middle part needs to loop. (The same goes for horizontal). So how do we fix this?

I actually like the placing of the muddle bar, I dislike the one that is on the upper edge, soooo…
let’s do some copy and paste.



The extra snippet goes on an extra layer (I use graphicsgale) above the tile we are working on, simply because that is non-destructive and we can easily try a different angle if we mess up!

As you can see, it didn’t work perfectly, there are clear seams on both edges.
There are multiple ways to get rid of them: manual pixel work, more copy and paste, or smoothing in. Since I don’t wanna move to layer masks and smoothing options yet (helpful tools for the experienced, can turn out awful if you aren’t), I’ll stick to the other ones.




Here we can for example add an extra patch below the first one (here I mirrored it vertically for some variation) and then go in with a hard eraser, creating a jagged edge that is not a smooth cut, which will blend in with wood texture a lot better:






We repeat that for the top, and are done:




And, it loops as it is supposed to:





Next one!



This one is tricky in a different way: it has all 16x16 shingles which makes it perfect for an easy conversion, but the pattern will not work.
Let us have a look, why.

As usual, “mapping” it to the right size looks fine at the first glance…



…but on the looping side, it doesn’t loop:



Again a vertical only problem, but still a problem.

As we just saw, those two shingle rows are the offenders: they need the same alignment to tile properly.
The thing is: If we just swap out one for the other one, the result is off:



Since there are only 2 different positionings for the shingles but 3 rows of shingles, one repeats twice and even three times on the bottom.
So the best looking solution here is to introduce a 3rd option of shingle alignment!



So these two rows need to filled with our third option.

To do that, we “shingle” out the existing options:



and use them as a guidance to make a third one below - again, by copy and paste!

We can start by copy and pasting the pattern and put it in in a slightly shifted position that looks good with the existing ones. (remember, it tiles, so you are not limited to the given width!)



And after trimming the excess and adding the outline we seem to be good to go!



Here the resulting tile:



And it tiles nicely:




So, to round it up we are going to look at another autotile, a wall this time



If you followed the tutorials and understand how autotiles work, you already see the issues.



We have two problems: the same as the shingles above had, but also a horizontal tiling issue, if we don’t like the irregular placing of those vertical beams.

Since I just explained how to fix the first issue, we know what to do and it already looks better:



To solve the spacing issue, we can simply rearrange the beams by copy and pasting:








Just a disclaimer: those are in no way the ONLY ways to do those upscales. There are many forks you can take in each process, but since upscaling larger quantities of tiles is A LOT of work I try to show you the simplest routes hat I think will work and look good.

How about we round it up with a final one?




Our shingles here are again working horizontally as is, but vertically…



What is happening here?



In the original tile, the three shingles making up the looping middle part of the tile are 10 and 11 pixels each in height, BUT for the MV/MZ size we need 48 px made out of whole shingles.
Either way, even if we only have 11 px shingles, there is an offset and the tiling does not work.
As a result, we need to edit all our shingles in length, so that they are 12 px high, since: 4x12=48

We can reserve the top and bottom…



and then use the free select to select through the middle of the shingles:



And then copy and paste them to the needed measurements.

We then re-add top and bottom and are done:





本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Avery处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/some-practical-upscaling-of-ace-to-mv-mz-tiles-2-on-some-nearly-tiling-stuff.173249/