I have a scene with a bunch of bland blank objects and i need to texture them. I know I can import a texture and apply the material to an object, and this is what the internet says to do as well. However, this creates so many problems. If I designed my texture to be tiling, it will only tile nicely on two sides and be very stretched on the other sides since I can only change how much it tiles for the whole object and not each face. Also I end up creating many copies of the material since the tiling changes are global. Have I misunderstood something? This process seems very awful. I cant even imagine what the process is if I import some non-cube model. How would I even make a texture for that? If its a long answer, are there any good resources out there that cover this specific step in design?
How much a texture stretches depends on texture coordinates.
That is something you solve while designing the object itself, and not by tweaking material parameters. Texture coordinates can tile across a single face easily.
For more information google “texture unwrap”.
Here’s random image off the web:
I’m just repeating neginfinity but in an alternate way:
You are missing key information about how 3d models work. Specifically the UV unwrap and texturing process, however in order to understand that it is good to start from the beginning.
If you are a visual learner just watch half a dozen youtube video tutorials about how to make 3d game assets. Watch the whole process a couple times and maybe even do a follow along tutorial where you make like a door or axe or something.
If you want to get a quick idea through reading and a few pictures the wiki at polycount has great overviews, as well as plenty of links to further learning resources.
Of course the unity documentation and learn area has explanations as well, but at least for me, instruction geared towards the artist is usually more digestible for a beginner.
Thanks, I definitely rush into the process as a hands on learner and missed this area. Thanks, I know what to do now…
Typically speaking in pre-production you decide on a texel density for your game art and combine this with texture atlasing to produce the required result.
Certain edge cases like really large structures (think of a space ship that is 200 meters long) require different techniques where you either split the model up or use other techniques to produce high quality results.
Like other said, UVs are the main way to deal with this stuff, but you can do a lot of other stuff like triplanar projection that works with just a mesh - no UV needed (but it has limited use cases, it’s a very strong tool for terrain for example)
To avoid the performance cost of a lot of materials you can do a texture atlas like @Havyx said, you just have one material with one texture and have everything read off it with the UV. (also look into mesh instancing and static batching)