Hello guys, I really appreciate your interest in this tool, more and more I am convinced that the guy from the Asset Store team who evaluated this asset was wrong in his evaluation, because there are more and more users looking for a tool like this.
90 percent or more of the people I follow on Twitter are pixel art artists or are involved in developing a game with pixel art style graphics. I have noticed a significant increase in the development of new 3D games with pixel art graphics style and I have nowhere found a tool like this suitable for use in 3D games, not even in other engines out there.
I know this spectacular tool for creating 3D models in pixel art style in Blender (Spritile), but unfortunately it is not ideal for creating the terrain because this tool generates 2 extra piligonos in the mesh for each tile. So imagine a scene of 1024x1024 meters, this will result in a mesh of 2,097,152 polygons if the terrain is just a plane. Adding mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, buildings and vegetation, the total number of polygons will become impractical for a pixel art game, not to mention the lighting and shadow that will triple the number of polygons in the scene. That is why 3D Tilemap System is an ideal tool for 3D pixel art games, you can paint as many tiles as you want without increasing the mesh polygons, you can paint directly on the Unity terrain or on your 3D mesh created in external applications.
See post number #2 to learn more about how this tool works.
As this tool will no longer be released on the Asset Store, I am recreating it completely from scratch with the purpose of satisfying my usage needs. As my case of use can be different from most, I will release a community version for free, the community version will contain the basic tools of use with the source code commented and structured in the simplest possible way to facilitate the use from beginners to advanced Unity users who will be able to extend the functionality for their own usage.
Unfortunately the asset was not accepted in the Asset Store, see post number #11 for more details.
Itās a shame it wonāt be released on the asset store. But you are a legend for releasing it to the community anyway! Looking forward to being able to use this amazing tool!
Iāve been looking for something exactly like this! Iām trying to build a 3D game with pixely textures, and Iād love to be able to paint them on both the ground and other 3D objects with the same ease as a 2D tileset, right in Unity.
Do you have an estimated release date?
Also, if the release turns out well, it might be worth trying to submit it to the Asset Store again. At the least, maybe make it donationware on an external site. It seems like it would be useful to many developers.
To paint the tiles on 3D objects it will be necessary to create a proper uv mapping to the model so that each pixel of the base texture covers the place of a tile on the mesh surface. This is very simple to do and it wonāt be a problem, but to create regular 3D objects in pixel art style, I recommend everyone to use one of these tools. Sprytile Crocotile3D
I am working on the community version right now and it should be more complete than the one shown here in the forum. There is no release date, but it shouldnāt take that long.
+1 to wanting this as an asset. Iād be happy to help work on it when you feel comfortable adding it to github. I remember using so so so so many terrible outdated assets when learning Unity, and it just surprises me that they do not find this to meet standards.
Deeply impressed by your work, itās going to enable people to create some amazing things someday, no matter what keep going with it!
Hi guys, I didnāt bring any news for a while because I was trying to implement some very important new features, but I didnāt know if it was possible or if it would work. So I waited to announce it only after everything was working fine. This features was very difficult to implement and, therefore, the release date will be slightly longer than expected.
Unlimited Tilemap Layers: It is now possible to add as many painting layers as you need, unlike the first development version that limited to just 4 layers. Of course, performance will be impacted according to the number of layers you use, but for that you will need to use an absurd number of layers.
When you click to paint, the system will paint on the layer currently selected in the list, everything is very practical and easy to use.
The old version shader used:
4 Texture2DArray RGBA32 to store the tiles, one texture per layer.
1 Texture2D RGBA32 to store the id of each tile on the tilemap, one channel per layer.
The new version now uses:
A single Texture3D RGBA32 that packs the tiles from all layers at once.
A single Texture3D R8 that stores the tile ids on the tilemap in each of its slices. One slice per layer.
Instead of using Texture2DArray, the new development version now uses Texture3D because this format works on older devices, which is not the case of Texture2DArray.
Alpha Intensity: Each layer has a slider to set the opacity. This simple feature greatly increases the possibilities of using the plugin. You can, for example, use different layers to paint the tiles for each season and just play with the opacity when you need to change to another season.
Soon I will show you some more new features that are on the way.
Copy and Paste: Another feature added successfully, it is now also possible to copy the information of the tiles painted in one layer and paste it to another layer. It looks like a very simple feature, but that makes using the plugin much more productive, imagine having to repaint another entire layer manually just to add the snow tiles on top.
This is too good not to be on the Unity Asset Storeā¦ I can imagine many developers would find this tool incredibly useful and possibly even encourage some to build games that were previously out of reach for them due to the tedious nature of texturing 3d object in pixelart style.
Great job mate!
PS. I am currently using Sprytile and have tried Crocotile too. These are good but at the moment lacking some core features (like auto-tiling). So i feel this is a very valuable alternative
Bro I need this asset yesterday! I would definitely help you out and donate if I could get access to this on a git or something. Itās exactly what I need!
Hey there, I stumbled upon your Tilemap Tool and I really like it!
My only question is, if I could somehow tweak the settings, so I can use larger āTile Sizeā like 512x512 or even 1024x1024?
Hi!
Just open the āTilePaletteInspectorā script located at the āEditorā folder and edit the variables ām_tileSizeArrayā and ām_tileSizeContentArrayā by adding the extra sizes you want to use.
Do the same to the āTilemapSystemInspectorā script.
The plugin does not necessarily need to be used only for pixel art, you can use the tiles with cartoon style or hand painted style or even with photorealistic style. The only issues I imagine that can be caused by using tiles with high resolutions are:
You may need to convert the tiles to the āTilePaletteā one by one because it will not be possible to create an atlas texture containing all the tiles, this will require a giant texture that will probably not be supported by the system.
This may cause the Inspector to be very slow when rendering the tile grid.
All the tiles used in each layer are packed together in a single Texture3D. So the higher the resolution of the tiles, the higher the size of the texture file and Unity limits the texture file size up to 4GB.
THIS IS AMAZING
I looked everywere for a plugin like this some time ago, until I gave up
I looks really good, I cant wait to try it out.
Great work man
