Some practical upscaling of Ace to MV/MZ tiles #3 - some floor thoughts

As you might have notices those tutorials turned into something more blog style about this specific things to be upscaled instead of a general formula, but a general formula is really hard to do: for each tile I have multiple angles I could take, and I basically look for something that I think lies in the sweet spot between effort and result.
So literally each piece gets a quick evaluation and a decision that might have looked different on another day or mood.

Since I wanna basically have you guys learn more with every one of these ones, I start with the easier ones so you can learn and improve over the ride - I honestly don’t know how long it will go since as everything this is very mood driven.

Today we are looking at some of the floors on A5, basically porting what I already showed on the other tutorials plus maybe some new things.

At first glance I can already single out these tiles.
As you can see due to my added grid, the tiles are 32x32, but they have actually tiling 16x16 pieces, which is super convenient since I am okay with those structures being a different scale in my upscale.


So without any other edit I can simply add another row and column and am fine!


And after a quick tiling test:

Works for me!

Here is a sweet opportunity: I could try to upscale both, but since one of them is just a recolor of the other I’ll just scale one and then do a recolor!

For the right one I could have went with the same technique as above, but since the checkerboard pattern only works with an even number of tiles, I’ll put in more effort - and I will at least end up with a 2 for 1 because of the recolor!

And again, there are multiple routes I could go: 4x4 tiles would be easier cause I would reduce the size of a single tile to 12x12 from 16x16, but in my opinion 24x24 or a 2x2 pattern looks better.

If I place my tile on the grid you can already see how much I’ll have to add for that.

There are again many routes I could have taken, but here is the one I chose:

With some cut and paste I basically place the edge pieces at the right spots, leaving a cross sized shape to be filled for each square.

And those crosses I decided to fill in by cutting and pasting pieces from the intact base tile that I kept on the side:

I made sure to pick the texture from different places to avoid a repeating pattern and copies some of the structure in the middle in the end and rotated it to have it look different and placed it over parts where I felt like you saw a rim or repeating pattern. Here is the result:


To recolor, I first adjusted the brightness and contrast alone by adding an all black layer that was on the mode saturation, so I was just looking at the brightness, completely ignoring hue and saturation. I find it easier to look at the values individually instead of at once sometimes.


and in this case, it was all that was needed:




Here are three more that I could have solved as the first batch, but I didn’t want to end up with super thin planks:


The pieces are a different shape, but I can just roll out the same technique as I did on the stone tile I just made:

I cut my pieces so the edges of each plank are covered and keep my base tile as “donation tile” on top so I can copy and paste from there.
Since the plans are tiling, I decided to first fill in a middle piece, as you can see below:


Then I cut the tiles in the middle and swap the positions, so my “perfect seam” that I had in the middle is now on the edge of the tile:


And there we go:

For some variation, wood textures like this one can often be mirrored horizontally or vertically. Just mirror a few of the pieces you paste and it helps to make the structure look better overall.

This also works for diagonal shapes:




But wait, what about these?

I already have the base, there is no way I am tackling the “whole tile”!

For the wooden tile, I found that it is easiest to adjust the size first by copy and pasting parts of the crack until it fits the size - really just box selection and then copy and paste, keeping the crack that I roughly cut out of the original on an extra layer on top.
Then I copy and paste 1 px wide parts of the straight edges and move them a little to create a rigged edge and maybe use a black brush if the black in the hole is uneven.


Here it was literally just the same.

And this works really for any shape. I copy and paste parts of the cracks while trying to keep a consistent shape. Consistent here is key, cause there is no need to recreate the original shape - for these tiles any crack dues, usually.
Then I touch of uneven edges and the mud and am done!



And here, too ;)

I do enjoy your tutorials. I always learn something, even when it is on a task that I have frequently done in the past. Your methods give a much better work flow than mine. When I see how you do it, I realise that I could have saved myself vast amounts of time.

Thank you.

somehow, DIY resources always look better than bundles or DLCs.