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This tutorial is about getting perfect texture alignment on a pillar, the pillar can be full or partial, the only requirement is that all of the surfaces on the pillars should have the same horizontal dimensions.

This is all going to be about numbers, and to make sure everything is perfect you'll need to choose the amount of times the texture is going to be horizontally tiled over the pillar (as in, how many times the texture repeats around the pillar).

We have to make sure the result of the following equation has no fractions. As you can see, the size of the pillar is completely irrelevant.
Let's try a simple example: - Texture: 128 pixels.
- Pillar: 8 sides, radius=64, AlignToSide=True.
- Number of tiles: 2 In this case, offset has no fraction, and we can do perfect alignment here.

Once you figured out the 'OFFSET', we need to figure out the horizontal scaling.
In order to do so, we need to measure one of the pillar's sides, or calculate it if we can't directly measure.
The best way to measure is using clip markers snapped to the pillar's vertices.
You're better off disabling 'Drag Grid' and creating the clip markers somewhere other than the pillar you're working on, then moving each marker on the 3d viewport into two of the pillar's points you want to measure. The editor will then snap the markers to said points, make sure you have the pillar already built into the map or there won't be any snapping. Once you've created two clip markers as shown above, calculate the distance between said points (it's a lot easier if done over one dimension).
Considering the pillar of the previous example, the measurement of one of the faces results in:
- 53.019165 Then we apply the following formulat to obtain the horizontal scale: Given the data of our previous example, the formula looks like this: When we apply that scale to the texture (at least horizontally, vertical can be anything), we'll be able to apply the offset incrementally on each of the faces and end up with perfectly aligned textures on the pillar.
Select all of the pillar's side surfaces:
- Hit 'Unalign'
- Apply the 'H_SCALE' you just calculated.
- Apply to (U or V pan) OFFSET (32 on our example).
- Deselect one surface, apply offset again.
- Deselect another surface, apply offset again.
- Keep doing that until you're done with the surfaces.

Due to rounding of some numbers the results may not be 100% perfect but the texture alignment's precision will be down to the pixel.

I made this thread sticky.

Note: 256² textures on a 45° angle have ~1.42 scale for alignment (I believe 1.4166666). That or half. Pretty handy number to know if you're texture aligning.

Swanky wrote: ↑Sun May 24, 2020 12:13 pm Note: 256² textures on a 45° angle have ~1.42 scale for alignment (I believe 1.4166666). That or half. Pretty handy number to know if you're texture aligning.

Not that you're a million miles out, but I'm sure when I tested the maths with this, it came to 1.414, or 0.707 if you're halving (great for diaginal trims). I recall it being an easy one to remember, as the numbers had a repeating pattern.

Something like that. Shouldn't make much of a difference on 256 pixels, though.

This should be translated to a new alignment option in the new UEd.

Feralidragon wrote: ↑Sun May 24, 2020 3:20 pm This should be translated to a new alignment option in the new UEd.

^^^THIS!!^^^

Yeah, align to wall would be a dream.

Some more dreaming: select a surface, choose "Align to..." and click to the surface where the first selected surface should be aligned to - including rotation, scaling, mirroring, flipping.

Barbie wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 1:37 pm Some more dreaming: select a surface, choose "Align to..." and click to the surface where the first selected surface should be aligned to - including rotation, scaling, mirroring, flipping.

I never knew I needed something so bad in my life...

I'll go and see if I can make it a reality.

Take for example a threshold in front of a door entry. The two visible surfaces at the long side should be aligned properly, but they are too small to do that manually.
Other example is a complex brush where one surface consists of multiple triangles. What a senseless work and wasted time to align each of them.

The buttons "Align to..." didn't work proper for some reason in both examples.

Yes!

Geometrically I think there are 2 cases:

- if the two surfaces are parallel, project the texture from source surface to target
- if they are not parallel, find intersection line and align the UV's to match on the intersection line

also, scaling should be transferred from source to target in every case.

So this should be fesable to implement, just have to work out the math.

You guys might want to check this out: Cylinder Aligner tool by yrex

You could also use my texture alignment tool. Download the script here: https://pastebin.com/4h7xDK2r. Save the text as a HTML-file and open it in your browser.

You can now also use the tool directly from my github-page: https://bloeb.github.io/ued_tex_align/u ... align.html

I think I'll copy first topic with calculations and... I'll write a builder calculator type...
It will be bCalcTexPillars or something like this.
I'll think about...

EDIT:
Perhaps this is the final stage... Easy and handy without ClipMarkers. Length of the face is calculated automatically due to CylinderRadius data known by user from source builder.