A Fresh Look: Improving Texture Variety

As part of adding a new sub-biome of the deep underground forest, it became apparent that some additional work was needed to achieve certain aesthetic features. This is a realisation of what was discussed a while ago here: Interesting tiles in Terraria Otherworld trailer

The tile sizes in the game are 8x8 - that means 8 pixels wide and 8 pixels high. This means that for things like the background walls and groups of blocks their repetition visually is immediately apparent.

For example the background walls pattern is easy to see even at a small size:
image

Same with this group of dirt blocks:
image

In order to reduce the obvious pattern repetition, the textures used by the tiles must be larger than the tiles themselves, and then tiles will simply be one 8x8 square in that larger texture.

Changing the background wall texture to follow this design, the background wall pattern no longer repeats at the small size:
image

Applying the same with the group of dirt blocks:
image

Result

Now if we apply this to most of the base tiles of the game, this is what we get:

Underground

Before:


After:

Surface

Before:


After:

Of course, these textures aren’t final.

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