Legacy:Surface Alignment

This tab of the Surface Properties Window aligns the texture on one or several surfaces.

1. select an alignment type in the left hand box
2. set parameters required
3. click "Align"

Note that the UTile and VTile properties work the opposite way to the scaling properties of the Pan tab. Here, a value of 4, for example, means shrink by a factor of 4, or tile 4 repetitions, not scale up by 4.

Default

Category:Legacy To Do

Planar

Seems to be good for cylinder sides

Face

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UT stuff below

Setting Alignment

There are several ways to align a texture.

Quick Properties window recap: Select the texture by clicking on it in the 3D UnrealEd Viewport. Hold down control while clicking to select multiple textures. Right-click on one of the textures you have selected to bring up the texture pop-up menu. Click on the alignment tab (you may have to click more than once or several combinations of clicks to bring up the tab, UnrealEd is rather messed up here).

Automatic

Automatic alignment commands in the Surface Properties Window align the texture based on where it is in the world grid

Align as Floor/Ceiling 

lines the texture up to an invisible floor grid.

Wall Direction 

Wall Pan 

Unalign 

Obviously, Align as Floor/Ceiling applies to generally horizontal surfaces and the other two apply to generally vertical surfaces. Selecting an alignment that has no bearing on the direction of surface you have selected (like Align as Floor/Ceiling applied to a straight up and down wall), will have no affect on the texture.

Numeric

Aligning to whatever specifications you want using the detailed alignment window

• You can move the texture vertically and horizontally using the 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 buttons in the top-left.
• In the bottom left, there are buttons that correspond to the menu options I mentioned earlier.
• At the top-right, there are a few buttons to rotate or flip the texture, just press them and see what they do, they're all pretty straight-forward.

Click the buttons to pan the texture in the U or V (horizontal & vertical) directions. If the surface has a flip or rotation applied, it moves into the applied direction. (arg... I'm too good at maths to explain this in n00b-friendly terms — tarquin)

Rotation

Allows texture to be rotation 45 or 90 degrees. Hold SHIFT while pressing the button with reverse the rotation. T horizontal or vertical surface can be flipped opposites if Flip U or Flip V is pressed.

Scaling

You can:

• Select a number from the "Simple" box's drop-down and hit Apply. This applies the scaling to the U and V axes.
• Type a number in the "Simple" box and hit Apply. This applies the scaling to the U and V axes.
• Type two numbers in the "U" and "V" boxes and hit the Apply button next to those

In all cases, checking "relative" will apply the scaling relative to the current scaling of the texture.

The Scaling fields don't display information about the selected texture, they merely allow you to set it. To read the current texture scaling values, type "POLY TEXINFO" into the UnrealEd Console and open the log window to see the information.

You can change the scaling of the texture a couple self-explanatory ways in the bottom-right.

Manual

There are also buttons in the toolbox for pan and rotate; though they still work in single units they are sometimes much faster. See:

• Texture Rotate
• Texture Pan

Tools

There's also TexAlign, an external utility for aligning textures on complex shapes like cylinders.

Reading Alignment

Use the POLY TEXINFO command in the UnrealEd Console and read the result in the Log window.

Cylinders

Thought it could be handy ; you can use tan(pi/n) (n number of side) as a factor for scaling,

for example with a 8 sides cylinder you could use U=tan(pi/8)*2=0.8284271247469898 and the textures will fit seamlessely

Comments

GTD-Carthage: I've got a UT'99 question. Is there no way to use the concept of the Align to Floor/Cieling Option (having textures to perfectly fit on a grid regardless of any slanted surfaces) on the X-Axis and/or Y-Axis? Or probably by just inputting a rotation number? The Align to Walls option just fits the texture to the horizontal axis and aligns it to a surface's left-most border - not the kind of aligning tool that's perfectly useful nowadays.

See also Surface Context Menu