Tiles

A tile sheet is an image cut into squares of the same size: floors, walls, doors, grass, rock. Tile Stamp puts one square on one face, corner to corner, so a grid of faces becomes a tiled floor or wall in a few strokes. It’s the quick way to build levels, rooms and blocks from an existing tile set, with the pixels exactly as drawn.

Tiles fit four-sided faces best: each corner of the face takes a corner of the tile. A Quad Grid (in the + menu) or the Grid starter, with a sheet imported, is a good place to start your own.

Start from a starter

Two starters on the home screen come with a tile sheet inside:

• Tiled Room: a floor and two walls stamped with fantasy tiles from Kenney’s Retro Textures Fantasy (CC0), with window decals over the walls.
• Terrain Block: grass, rock and borders in 16-pixel tiles, with a boulder and a tree.

Open one, choose Tile Stamp, and restamp a few faces to see how it’s made. Both are ordinary Qwartz models, made in Qwartz with the tools on this page.

Stamp tiles

1. Choose Tile Stamp, the last tool in the tool strip on the left (on a Mac, press T). The tile panel opens on the right, with the sheet. The ? after its tools opens this page.
2. Tap a tile in the sheet. It’s outlined.
3. Tap a face to stamp it, or drag across faces to stamp each one you cross. One drag is one step of undo.

On a Mac, with the stamp, the tile shows on the face under the pointer before you click, and the arrow keys move the outline to the next tile in the sheet.

Pick a tile. Zoom the sheet with − and + above it, or pinch it on iPad, and scroll it to reach the rest. The eyedropper in the panel picks the tile from a face instead, on the current layer, with its rotation and flips: tap a face with it, then choose the stamp to use that tile. On a Mac, Option-click a face with any tile tool.

Erase. The eraser removes the tile from the faces you tap or drag across, on the current layer only. Erasing the Base tile gives the face back its plain look.

Rotate and flip

The three buttons under the layers turn the tile before you stamp it:

• Rotate turns it a quarter turn clockwise; the angle shows next to the buttons. On a Mac, press R.
• Flip H mirrors it left to right (F on a Mac), Flip V top to bottom (Shift-F).

They apply to the tiles you stamp next, and stay on until you turn them off. To mirror tiles that are already on the model, select their faces and use Flip H or Flip V in the action bar: see Flip a texture.

Layers and decals

A face holds up to four tiles, one per layer:

• Base is the tile the face is made of: wood, stone, grass.
• L1, L2 and L3 are decals, drawn over the Base in that order. Their transparent pixels let what’s under them show through: a window on a wall, a crack on a floor, moss on a stone.

Choose a layer in the panel before you stamp, erase or pick: each tool works on that layer only. A dot under a layer’s name means the selected face already has a tile on it.

Tile sheets

Import a sheet. Press Import Tile Sheet at the bottom of the tile panel and pick a PNG. Qwartz guesses the tile size from the image (64, 32 or 16 pixels); if it guessed wrong, set Tile above the sheet to the size your tiles really are, from 8 to 256 pixels. Tiles are square.

Make your own. New Tile Sheet asks for a tile size and how many tiles across and down, and adds an empty, transparent sheet. Stamp one of its tiles on a face (the face looks empty: the tile is still transparent) and paint on that face with the Paint tool: the paint goes into the tile on the sheet.

Paint on tiles. The Paint tool works on stamped faces too. Where the current layer has a tile on the face, the paint goes into that tile on the sheet, so every face that uses the tile changes with it. Where it has none, the paint goes on the face itself, over its tiles, like pixel paint.

Several sheets. A model can hold several sheets. When it does, a menu above the sheet switches between them, and choosing a layer switches to the sheet its tile on the selected face comes from. Each sheet is also a Texture material in the Materials panel, named after the sheet.

Export

Tiles export like any texture, with no extra step:

• A face with only a Base tile exports as it is: the sheet goes with the model as its texture, and the face points at its tile through UVs.
• A face with decals or pixel paint on it is flattened when you export: its Base, its decals and its paint are drawn into one image for the object, and the face points at its part of that image.

Your model in Qwartz keeps its layers; only the exported file is flattened. See Export for the formats and how to bring the file into Godot, Unity or Blender.