As anyone who plays minecraft may know the game world is made up of cubes. On each of the six sides of these cubes are tiles. These tiles are comprised of typically a single texture taken from the terrain.png. Because of this you often will see the same texture tile being repeated numerous times in your field of vision while playing minecraft. Grass, dirt and smoothstone being the most common. from this comes the term "tiling."
Tiling:the techniques used to hide the fact that there are repeating tiles in a landscape.
So, basically when someone says that a texture has bad tiling or tiles poorly than it is because it is apparent that things are made of repeating tiles.
The different attributes of good tiling
Tiling can be broken up into three main ideas; edges, patterns and lighting.
Edge Tiling:
Getting the edges of your tile to line up is the utmost important thing you can do for good tiling. If you can't get this than you need to go back and redo your texture. There are several way to accomplish this depending on your resolution and style. I personally like to create a new file that is a square with dimensions that are three times larger than the tile you are testing. So, if you are working on a 16x pack than the tiling template would be 48x48. In the example below I am editing a 256x texture so the tiling template is 768x768.
This is an example of good and bad edge tiling. The area circled in blue has been edited using the clone tool and smudge tool (something I wouldn't suggest for lower resolutions). The area circles in green is as it was with the paper background removed. As you can see the edges do not match up. This makes the individual tiles VERY visible.
Good:
Bad:
A note: Edge tiling can be ignored when making things like glass, ore blocks or the spawner. Because these tiles most often have a border of some sort.
Pattern Tiling:
Patterns are the second most important thing to pay attention to for good tiling. Now, here is were it get's a tad fuzzy. The standard states that visible repeating patterns are bad and ruin tiling, however, I know a few good packs that accentuate repeating patterns. The thing to keep in mind is that if you are going to break this standard make sure you go all out. A half attempt will just look like poor tiling. Below I will show four examples of pattern tiling.
This is from the same pack that the brick above is from. Notice that there is a visible repeating pattern yet it tiles well.
This, however, does not tile well. Here I was attempting to restrain the pattern to the tile without having it flow over the edges. However, what I ended up doing was creating a grid out of horizontal and vertical lines.
Here is an example of how you CAN create a pattern restrained to the tile like what I attempted with the above and still have it tile well.
And here is an example of tiling without an obvious pattern
Lighting Tiling:
This is were things get tricky, in fact this is where I tend to fail the most myself. The secret to good light tiling is to make sure that there are no large bright or dark spots in areas that do not need them.
Here is an example of bad light tiling. Notice how the edges meet up perfectly and the pattern tiles rather well, however the highlights are not broken up enough and it creates unintentional shapes.
Here, we have a texture that tiles well in all aspects.
I hope this helps, please feel free to post with questions.
I'm not entirely sure how needed this was, but nice job.(Usually people make all-around good packs, or, more commonly, derp buckit fil)
I'm sure it will help a good amount of people.
Oh, and, on pattern tiling, you said "back" instead of "pack".
As anyone who plays minecraft may know the game world is made up of cubes. On each of the six sides of these cubes are tiles. These tiles are comprised of typically a single texture taken from the terrain.png. Because of this you often will see the same texture tile being repeated numerous times in your field of vision while playing minecraft. Grass, dirt and smoothstone being the most common. from this comes the term "tiling."
Tiling: the techniques used to hide the fact that there are repeating tiles in a landscape.
So, basically when someone says that a texture has bad tiling or tiles poorly than it is because it is apparent that things are made of repeating tiles.
Tiling can be broken up into three main ideas; edges, patterns and lighting.
Edge Tiling:
Getting the edges of your tile to line up is the utmost important thing you can do for good tiling. If you can't get this than you need to go back and redo your texture. There are several way to accomplish this depending on your resolution and style. I personally like to create a new file that is a square with dimensions that are three times larger than the tile you are testing. So, if you are working on a 16x pack than the tiling template would be 48x48. In the example below I am editing a 256x texture so the tiling template is 768x768.
This is an example of good and bad edge tiling. The area circled in blue has been edited using the clone tool and smudge tool (something I wouldn't suggest for lower resolutions). The area circles in green is as it was with the paper background removed. As you can see the edges do not match up. This makes the individual tiles VERY visible.
Good:
Bad:
A note: Edge tiling can be ignored when making things like glass, ore blocks or the spawner. Because these tiles most often have a border of some sort.
Pattern Tiling:
Patterns are the second most important thing to pay attention to for good tiling. Now, here is were it get's a tad fuzzy. The standard states that visible repeating patterns are bad and ruin tiling, however, I know a few good packs that accentuate repeating patterns. The thing to keep in mind is that if you are going to break this standard make sure you go all out. A half attempt will just look like poor tiling. Below I will show four examples of pattern tiling.
This is from the same pack that the brick above is from. Notice that there is a visible repeating pattern yet it tiles well.
This, however, does not tile well. Here I was attempting to restrain the pattern to the tile without having it flow over the edges. However, what I ended up doing was creating a grid out of horizontal and vertical lines.
Here is an example of how you CAN create a pattern restrained to the tile like what I attempted with the above and still have it tile well.
And here is an example of tiling without an obvious pattern
Lighting Tiling:
This is were things get tricky, in fact this is where I tend to fail the most myself. The secret to good light tiling is to make sure that there are no large bright or dark spots in areas that do not need them.
Here is an example of bad light tiling. Notice how the edges meet up perfectly and the pattern tiles rather well, however the highlights are not broken up enough and it creates unintentional shapes.
Here, we have a texture that tiles well in all aspects.
I hope this helps, please feel free to post with questions.
I'm sure it will help a good amount of people.
Oh, and, on pattern tiling, you said "back" instead of "pack".