Some practical upscaling of Ace to MV/MZ tiles #4 - Grass and easier way to scale some types of ground variations

If you read the other tutorials and/or follow my resource thread, you will have seen that by now (Jan 2025) I have taken out a lot of the autotiles that can be upscaled pretty “easily”. Maybe you learned something new already, maybe that had you thinking that converting is always super easy and fast… if it just was. Well, today we are looking at some tiles that are already a bit trickier but that can be scaled using techniques that I still think all of you can learn and use.

Let’s go!


we have converted and basically “patched up” several wooden floor tiles already, and to enable myself to be able to make some of the “grass based” tiles, I need to upscale the base first.
Now, there is no reason to despair, since the grass is just a “noisy green patch” anyways.

With the same technique I already showed, I will basically cut up the tile so I keep the already tiling parts on the rim and just have to fill in the middle. I have also set up a 4x4 patch of the default tile on the side to have a base to copy and paste, and now I am basically working my way through every direction. As you can see, my first cut was vertical.

https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfLTdzr_meFcHOWdx6WKWvE5x8xd3r-nQkQsonZ0XwsgN0-WuC2BlnDiW2nl7VsPwFB-GA3WEbbZpYkMJI2fLcVQOXHofUnTh6ojIxMBrQMoPE09uogSmE55SzmP5Xyl0i2mA?key=jimDneVz9wI9Yw3QhUVlxDJ4
With the “free” selection I copied some randomly shaped parts and stitched up the gap I have created. For my next cut, I will snip through this horizontally and swap the position of the pieces.

Here we go after the stitching…

… all that is left is the vertical cutting and filling up again.


This doesn’t work for every texture, but it will help with quite some of them!

And now the reason why I wanted this tile: I did not want to have every grass tile to have a different pattern, so in every other autotile where I have grass, I will use this tile to ensure seamlessness, not only when it comes to the seam, but also to avoid random pattern changes.

Just for perspective, those are all the tiles that use the grass tile in this set:

For some of these it is definitely easier, to just edit them - at least to a certain degree - than to try to make a perfect upscale. For example:

This tile is nothing but a darker shadow part on a regular tile. All you actually need is some kind of template for the shape. Usually I just use one of the default MV or MZ shadow tiles but since I want my conversion not to be engine bound and that would be an edit, I am picking something from the set. I could build something myself, but I find this easier and we are here for out of the box thinking and practical solutions, right?

The inside of this grass autotile works for what I am planning - I am not yet ready to upscale it to use it, but to abuse it as a template - let me show you how.

Quick blurry upscale, don’t care, my shadow will blur into the grass anyways.

Then I use the magic wand to roughly select the shape I need for my shadow - playing with the threshold and adding and removing as I like:


With just some more box removal, I have this shape selected:

Tip: Use a grid to ensure the edges are in the right place, especially on the upper right tile with the corners.

I fill in the selection all white on another layer and I have something that I will need a lot from now: a handy template to blend two floor tiles into each other. If you notice stray pixels that came from a messy selection, this is also the step where I “clean it up” with the pencil and the eraser. Now, how is this going to save me a lot of time, when I just had to put in some extra work?


I make a new file with my grass as base and my “top” part of the layer using my new template as a layer mask.

Learn more about layer masks:
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/inde...es-a-5-minute-hack-to-nice-transitions.99753/
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/inde...s-and-in-depth-talk-about-layer-masks.156348/

All I have to do now is to select the hue, lightness and saturation value I like for my shadow part and am done:

Since I have this template now, it enables me to quickly do such ground variations, because I can ignore the whole border and setup and just have to convert one base tile.

This works for those two here, for example, too:


I am repeating my same routine here that I had for the grass, cutting…

…and stitching…

…and cutting…

…and stitching…

…and cutting…


and stitching.


Disclaimer: of course the flowers were a lot more difficult and required a lot more zooming in, ensuring the petals stayed intact and here and there a few hand placed pixels for touch up. I considered a different scaling technique here, upscaling and retouching, but settled for the - in my opinion - quicker and easier to reproduce one to show here.

But now I can fill the layer that formerly only held the darker grass (and uses the template as layer mask) simply with these just created tiles, aaaand:


This way I save a lot of stress since I separate the “working autotile pattern” and “seamless ground pattern” from each other. And not only that, as I already said, the grass on the different tiles will always be seamless without pattern breaks.

To convert resources, I take a large photo and then resize it to the grid of the tileset of the maker I'm going to use.

The image size must be compatible with the resizing. It's like a round numbering, and by doing this the scene will be perfectly the same as the previous maker.

It's simple to say, but it requires maintaining a standard grid size for the print, opening the print in the image editor, removing the template background, cutting and pasting it in the resized tileset that I'm going to use.

The process can also be done in parts, each tile at a time.

I don't have the images at the moment, so I'd have to download them, but I think you can see that I did the process here in this image.