Release Notes

0.0.29

Mini Bases

You can now use MakeTile to generate Mini Bases. Round, Oval, Polygonal, Rectangular and Rounded Rectangular bases are all supported. You can choose whether or not your base is hollow and dynamically set the dimensions as usual.

0.0.28

Asset Manager

Thumbnail image cacheing has been implemented for the Asset Manager. While this means there is a slight lag the first time the asset bar is opened, navigating between folders should now be instant and there are no more files being linked in the background.

More S-Wall (Wall on Floor) tiles

Curved, L and U walls now support S-wall (wall on floor) type walls. To create a wall on floor tile select the OpenLOCK S-Wall or Plain S-Wall base type. You can choose to place the wall on the side, in the center or generate an exterior wall.

L-Walls treat the 90° case differently to other cases. If your L Wall has a 90° angle then the base generated will be a rectangle sized so it matches the legs of the wall. If the angle is other than 90° the width of the base can be set separately.

Exterior walls

You can now generate exterior walls for all wall tile types. Choose OpenLOCK S-Wall or Plain S-Wall and then set the wall position to Exterior. Exterior walls can take longer to generate than ordinary walls as sockets need to be cut into both the base and the wall. For the same reason using Make3D on them can take longer. You'll see some graphical glitches where the faces of the base and wall overlap however these will not be reflected in the exported model provided you have voxelisation on export switched on.

0.0.27

Asset Manager

The asset manager has been completely overhauled for Blender 3.0 and is now compatible with the new Blender internal Asset Browser. See Asset Manager for details.

Lastlock Tiles

I have added the option to create LastLock style base sockets when creating an OpenLOCK tile. These are full compatible with OpenLOCK but also have a divot where you can insert a 5mm sphere magnet so you can snap tiles together.

Triangular tiles

The triangular floor generator has been tweaked so that if the triangle is an isosceles right triangle (both legs are equal length and angle is 90°) and it is an OpenLOCK triangle it will have sockets on all three sides. Otherwise it will have sockets on two sides if it is an OpenLOCK tile.

0.0.26

Material Importing

Various bugs have been fixed in the way that materials are imported and saved. Saved materials based on the custom image material should now have the displacement texture saved properly so won;t break when you come to reuse them. There is also now an option to not import user materials on load. See the faq for more details.

0.0.25

Optimisation

The tile generators have all been optimised. Adding a new tile to a scene with a lot of geometry such as where you have already made several tile 3D should now be much quicker.

Semi Circular Tiles

Semi circular tiles are now limited to angles between 45 and 179.999 degrees to prevent the tile generator from breaking.

0.0.24

Redo Panel

Immediately after creation tile properties can now be modified using the redo panel that appears on the left hand side when you click MakeTile. This panel dissapears once the tile is deselected. For complex tiles like the roof tiles you can turn off auto update by clicking on the car (auto) icon until you have made your changes and then click on the refresh icon.

Floor Blueprints

Previously there was the option for OpenLOCK or Plain floor main part types which were exactly the same. There is now just the option for Plain main parts to reduce redundancy.

The Straight Floor Tile Type has also been removed as the tile generator for the Rectangular Floor tile type can now produce these tiles.

S-Tiles

The first set of S-Tiles (Wall on floor type tile) have been produced. Currently Straight and Curved Walls are supported and you can find the options for these by changing the base type to OpenLOCK S-Wall or Plain S-Wall in the Base Blueprints panel.

Materials

For tiles with multiple textured parts such as the Roof tiles and S-Tiles you can now set the materials for each part seperately at tile creation. Because of this the material picker has now been moved from the top of the MakeTile menu to the blueprint section of the tile creators.

0.0.23

Roofs

The first set of roofs are now available in the tile generator. You can create Apex style, Butterfly or Shed roofs.

Apex Roof

Butterfly Roof

Shed Roof

Subdivision Density

When creating a tile you can now choose between High, Medium or Low subdivision density (Highlighted in Red) rather than having to specify how much you want to subdivide each part of a tile along each axis. In general this should keep the resolution of all your tiles consistent as long as you select the same subdivision density level when creating your tiles. You can still choose to subdivide a tile again post creation using the control at the top.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where extra side sockets weren't being added when tiles were greater than 2 inches high.

• The reversed roator bug was fixed by the Blender core team which broke some of the tile generators again. These have now been fixed.

0.0.22

Color Picker

Added a basic color picker to all MakeTile materials.

U-Tiles

Fixed a bug in U-Tiles where wall sockets weren't appearing correctly if there was no base.

0.0.21

Curve Texture option on curved floor tiles is now set to False by default so when you make a curved floor tile 3D the texture will be the same as the preview.

Gridify Material You can now take any MakeTile material and overlay a grid onto it. Simply select an object with a MakeTile material on it, select the material in the Materials sub panel of the MakeTile menu and then at the bottom of the Material Options sub panel you will find a new Gridify button. CLick this and a grid will be overlaid on your material. By default this is a 1 x 1 grid, but the scale, rotation and location can be adjusted in the Material Options sub panel. To remove the grid simply click the Ungridify button.

0.0.20 Hotfix 1

Fixed a bug in curved tile base creation where OpenLOCK sockets weren't appearing in the right place for tile wider than 0.5 inches

Added a Curve Texture option to curved floor tiles. This controls whether the texture is curved when you make the tile 3D.

0.0.20

Save Material

If you also have the MakeTile asset manager add-on installed then saving a material from the MakeTile menu will save the material as a MakeTile asset.

Displacement Image Format

Displacement images are now saved in .png format rather than open exr. This saves substantially on space and makes sense given the lack of need for super high quality displacement maps in MakeTile.

Add / Subtract Object from tile

There is now an add / subtract object from tile option available in the right click menu when you right click on an active object that belongs to a tile collection. This allows you to either add or boolean subtract any object from a tile.

Add collection to tile

There is now an Add Collection to Tile option available in the right click menu when you right click on an active object that belongs to a tile collection. This works in conjunction with the asset manager to allow you to add architectural elements such as doors and windows to tiles.

0.0.19 Hotfix 1

Fixed a couple of bugs in the object converter and one where the material helper object wasn't being added corectly.

Display Settings Changes

When you change between Cycles, Eevee or Solid view using the Render Engine drop down in the Display Settings submenu MakeTile will now automatically adjust the level of subdivisions on MakeTile displacement objects (objects that you can Make3D) to the most appropriate level for that object and render engine to improve performance.

If an object has been Made3D then nothing will happen when you switch render modes. If an object is in preview mode then if you switch to Eevee or the Solid renderer, then MakeTile will turn off the subdivision modifier as it isn't needed in these modes. If you switch to Cycles mode then MakeTile will switch the modifier back on so you can preview a material in 3D.

This only works if you use the Render Engine drop down in the MakeTile menu, not if you switch modes in the normal fashion.

0.0.19

This is purely a bug fix release to handle some of the more egregious bugs caused by Blender being updated to 2.91.

2.91 has a huge bug in it that causes rotations to be inverted when they are triggered by a script or if you enter a numeric value to get a precise rotation. As such several of MakeTile's tile generators are pretty much broken and I've had to temporarily invert a bunch of rotations, which once the Blender bug is fixed, I'll have to invert again. Fun!

0.0.18

This release adds a new option to the Exporter Export Active Object, changes the behaviour of the object converter slightly, adds two new procedural materials Wooden Planks and Wooden Framework and a couple of bug fixes.

Object Exporter

There is now a seperate Export Active Object operator in the Export menu. This exports only the Active Object using the Units, Voxelise, Decimate, and Fix non-manifold settings. This is mostly useful if you have imported an object into MakeTile and rescaled it and then want to export it at the correct scale, but don't want to convert your object to use the MakeTile material system.

Object Converter

MakeTile allows you to convert any object to use the MakeTile material system. Previously when you converted an object MakeTile would automatically add whatever material was in the Main Material drop down to the entire object. Now, if an object already has 1 or more vertex groups with vertices assigned, MakeTile adds a material only to the first vertex group when you convert it. This change is largely for convenience as its often easiest to create vertex groups during modelling rather than later by manually selecting vertices.

New Materials

There are two new procedural materials included in this release for all MakeTile users. These are tidied up versions of the Wooden Planks and Wooden Framework materials from the Kickstarter videos.

~~Because both these materials need to pick up a lot of detail to work properly, when creating your tiles you should bump up the amount of "native subdivisions" per 2 inches along your major axes from the default 15 to probably closer to 50 before you create your tile.~~

This control now gives you a choice between High, Medium and Low. Use High.

This will slow down tile creation somewhat but is more efficient than setting the number of subdivisions post tile creation in the top panel, as setting native subdivisions only creates geometry where needed.

The Wooden Planks material behaves very similarly to the various block based materials like the Bricks and Regular Stone Blocks materials, except you can also control many aspects of the wooden grain structure.

The Wooden Framework Material is a bit different.

The plaster depth and texture and the grain pattern of the wood can be controlled as you would expect, but the pattern of the wooden beams can also be controlled using the Beams options in the Material Options panel. This is what the material looks like in its default state:

You can turn individual beams off by setting their thickness to -1:

If you set the Alternating Horizontals setting to 1 it will mask off half of the horizontal beam allowing patterns like this:

This material is particularly complex and there are other settings that you can change in the material itself. To do this go into the shader editor in Blender and find the Beams Advanced Frame in the bottom left of the workspace.

Here you can individually control the offset of the different beams, have more control over their thickness and control more of the masks that make up this material. I've intentionally not exposed these settings in the Blender UI as frankly it's really easy to break this material, especially if you start changing the beam offsets while having the diagonals switched on.

Bug fixes

A major bug that caused serious lagging when moving tiles with booleans on them was fixed. In one of the previous updates I added a triangulate modifier to the modifier stack in order to get rid of the graphical glitch below on difference booleans:

Unfortunately this utterly kills performance on the current release builds of Blender so I have removed it. This glitch doesn't effect the tile sonce they have been made 3d and exported but it doesn't look great and I'm hoping to fix it in another way in future.

0.0.17

This update focuses on fixes and improvements to the exporter and other utilities. You can download it from Gumroad by logging into your Gumroad account if you've already downloaded a previous version, or if you've not downloaded it yet by following the link in the email you got from me.

Make sure you fully remove the old version of MakeTile before installing the new version. You can find details of how to do this in the documentation.

Decimation

There is now a Decimate option that allows you to decimate your tiles on export. Settings for this can be found in the Decimation Settings panel. You can choose whether to add a separate Planar decimation step that will further simplify flat portions of the mesh after the main decimations step.

Fix non-manifold

If you have the 3D-Print Toolbox add-on that is included with Blender installed and you choose to voxelise your mesh on export, then you will have the option to Fix non-manifold appear in the Export and Voxelise settings panel. This will run the 3D-Print Toolbox Make Manifold operator on each exported mesh and will attempt to fix any geometry errors created during the voxelisation process.

Rescale Object

The Rescale Object operator now rescales all selected objects relative to the 3D cursor rather than individually so relative distances between objects are preserved.

Convert To MakeTile Object

If an object already has a vertex group(s) added to it before you convert it to a MakeTile object then MakeTile will only add a material to the first vertex group rather than the whole object.

Material Mapping

When you first create a tile using the MakeTile operator MakeTile will now create a hidden empty object called Material Helper Empty and set this empty as the Reference Object for each MakeTile materials texture coordinates. This corrects for an error when using the Wrap Around material mapping which caused materials to display incorrectly when tiles were rotated:

This fixes this error but it does change the behaviour of the materials in that previously tiles which shared a material would display an identical "bit" of that material:

Under the new system the tile's location determines what part of a material is displayed on that tile:

Arguably this is more realistic and I think it is a better default behaviour.

You can still get the old behaviour back by deleting the reference object in the Material Mapping panel

Bug Fixes

Other than that there have been various annoying bugs to do with tiles or converted objects exporting without texture on them when the randomise function is turned on. I think I've fixed the underlying issue that was causing this, however if you've been affected by this bug you'll probably need to reassign the material to the now blank area like this.