Make a set of tileable textures

Last updated: October 12, 2026

Make a set of ground and wall materials in one look, each one tiling without a seam, and take them into your engine with the maps it needs for lighting. This is the path for an environment artist dressing a level, a biome or a dungeon.

What you'll make

One PBR material per surface (for example a ground, a path, a wall and a trim), each a set of maps that repeat on both axes: base color, normal in both OpenGL and DirectX conventions, roughness, metalness, height and ambient occlusion, plus packed maps for Unity and for an ORM workflow. Each material downloads as one zip.

If the game is unlit or 2D and needs colour only, the same recipe works with Create texture in place of Create PBR materials: it makes a single seamless image.

Before you start

  • A shared description of the look that every surface in the set repeats word for word: the setting, the palette, the level of wear. Write it once and reuse it, so the set reads as one place.
  • The scale of each surface: how much ground one tile covers and how big its features are. "A 2-metre square of scree, stones from fist to head size" tiles at a believable size; "rocks" does not.
  • Each material is one run. See Creative Units for how runs are charged.

Make each material

Run this once per surface in the set, changing only the surface and keeping the shared description.

  1. In a session, open Create PBR materials from the side panel (under See all tools if it is not listed).

  2. Click the model name and choose a tileable model, such as PATINA Tileable 1.0. Its maps repeat on both axes; a model without tiling makes a material that shows a seam when repeated.

  3. Describe the surface: what it is, its scale, even lighting, and no single dominant feature. A crack or a large stone in the middle becomes a grid of identical cracks once the floor is tiled. To match a reference instead, add a photo or texture under Texture or photo.

  4. Click Generate materials. The material lands on the board when the run finishes.

Check it tiles

Judge a material repeated, not as one tile. The viewer renders it live and repeats it across a plane.

  1. Click View on the material. It opens on a sphere, lit.

  2. Choose Plane. The material repeats across it: look along the joins for a seam, and across the whole plane for a feature that repeats into an obvious pattern.

  3. Click through the maps in the strip below, such as Normal (GL) and Roughness, to check each one before it reaches the engine. 3D returns to the render.

If the seam is fine but a feature repeats too visibly, run it again with stronger language about an even distribution; editing the feature out locally tends to bring the seam back.

Hand it off

Download each material from the viewer. The zip holds every map as a PNG and a manifest naming them, so pick the files your engine's shader reads.

Unity

Use the base color, the normal map in the OpenGL convention (set its texture type to Normal map), and the packed map for your pipeline: the metallic-smoothness map for the Built-in and URP Lit shaders, or the HDRP mask map for HDRP. Set the material's tiling to match the surface size.

Unreal Engine

Use the base color, the DirectX normal map and the ORM map (ambient occlusion, roughness and metalness in the red, green and blue channels). Turn sRGB off on the ORM and normal textures.

Godot

In a StandardMaterial3D, use the base color, the OpenGL normal map and either the separate roughness, metalness and occlusion maps or the ORM map. Set the UV1 scale so the tile repeats at the right size.

Scale it up

  • Hold the look across the set. Train a reference set on the approved materials' base colors, or on your existing environment art, and use it for every surface. See Reference sets.
  • Batch it. Build a workflow that takes a list of surfaces and the shared description and makes one material per line, so each biome is one run. See Build prompts from a template in a workflow and Build and publish a workflow.
  • Review before hand-off. Check every material on the plane, and keep the approved set together in a project so the team imports the right versions. See Organize work into projects.

If something goes wrong

  • A visible seam where the tiles meet. The model does not tile. Choose a tileable model and run it again; no edit afterwards removes a seam reliably.
  • The surface has a light direction baked in. Shadows in the colour map fight the engine's lights. Ask for even, diffuse lighting with no directional shadows.
  • The scale is wrong in the game. One tile covers too much or too little. Describe the scale in the prompt, or change the material's tiling in the engine.
  • The set does not look like one place. The shared description changed between runs. Reuse it word for word, or apply one reference set to every run.

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