Texture tiling with continuous random offset?

Question

I have a texture and a mesh, if I apply the texture on the mesh, it tiles it continuously as one would expect. The offset for each tile is equal.

The problem:

Non-tilable texture or texture with some outstanding elements are looking repetitive and cheap.

Example:

Solution Attempt

My first attempt was to programatically generate a texture size of a mesh with randomised offsets for each tiles. Of course the size of the texture became a problem, let alone the GPU limitation of a single texture max size.

What I would like to do

I would like to know if there's a way to make a Unity shader or a material that would load a single texture and tile it with random offsets for each tile and do it only once to keep the performance high?

Answer 1

I believe you might try one of techniques invented by Inigo Quilez (http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/texturerepetition/texturerepetition.htm).

Answer 2

Basically, non-tilable textures and textures with some outstanding elements are different problems.

Non-tilable textures

There are 2 ways of solving it:

1. Fixing the texture itself;
2. Mirrored repeat can be used in some cases (see GL_MIRRORED_REPEAT)

Textures with some outstanding elements

This can be solved in the following ways (or conjunction of them):

1. Modifying the texture (this includes enlargement as well);
2. Using multitexturing;
3. Well, maybe mirrored repeat can be used as well in some cases.

Shifting texture coordinates randomly

Unfortunately, I can't think of any case of these 2 problems (except, maybe, white nose textures) where texture coordinates shifting is a solution.

Answer 3

You are looking at this problem the wrong way. All games face this issue. They hide it simply by a) varying textures a lot instead of texturing large areas with the same texture and b) through level design. Imagine this plane filled with barns, gras, trees, fences and what not - suddenly the mono-textured surface blends in with its surroundings. Also camera angle plays a huge role in this. Try changing your camera position close to the ground and the repeating texture is much less noticeable.

Your plane is just a very extreme example. You should not try to fix it at this point but rather continue to build your game. Or design your textures to repeat well without showing clear patterns. The extreme would be a flatcolored texture. But generally large outdoor terrain textures simply have very little structure, almost being like noise, plus they don't use colors with any contrast, just shades of the same color.

Your offset idea won't work. Perhaps it might work technically (it may be inefficient though). But random offsets can't cover up the patterns, instead it will create new ones because the textures won't smoothly interpolate at their edges anymore, so you could clearly see a grid of squares. That I guess would be even uglier and more noticeable.

Lastly you can increase texture size or scale (blurryness may need to be covered up as explained above). In relation to camera angle this would be the easiest, most effective fix. Or at least an improvement.

Answer 4

old thread, but relevant to many I think. You can do this in a shader, by randomizing the Vertex position on the XZ plane, (or better) the UV co-ordinates, based on the world space of the co-ordinates. The texture will still tile.... but instead of being in a straight line... it will be in a random wiggly line. This is great for stuff like terrain, grass etc.... but obviously no good if you want to maintain straight lines in your textures.

A second option is diffuse-detail shader. It tiles one texture up close to camera, and another when further away (which you can make softer / more blurry

Third option... blend 2 textures together, with different UV tiling scale (non divisible. e.g not scale 2 and 4, but use 1 and 2.334556) on each, so the pattern is harder to see