Tile preview
Render the canvas as a 3×3 grid of tiles. The centre tile is your interactive canvas; the 8 neighbours are display-only copies. Use this to design seamless tilesets — you immediately see how your tile will look when repeated, including edge-wrap artefacts.
Where to find it
| Hotkey | T |
| Top bar | Grid icon (toggle button) |
How it works
When tile preview is on, the editor renders 9 copies of your canvas's composed pixels in a 3×3 grid. Edges of the centre tile align with the start of the neighbour tiles, so you can spot:
- Visible seams — where the tile doesn't wrap cleanly
- Hard edges — patterns that abruptly change at borders
- Asymmetric tiling — left edge doesn't match right edge
You can still draw on the centre tile as normal — pencil, eraser, fill, all tools work. The 8 neighbour tiles are display-only and update live as you paint.
Workflow
- Create a square canvas (32×32 or 64×64 are typical tile sizes).
- Press
Tto enable tile preview. - Start painting features near the centre. As you approach the edges, watch the neighbour tiles to see how the wrap will look.
- To create a seamless texture, paint across the edge — the same content appears on both sides automatically because of the tiling.
- For non-tiling decoration in the middle, you don't need to worry about edges.
Tips
- For isometric tiles, the standard 3×3 grid still works; just be aware that isometric layouts often need diagonal seam-checking too. Use
Shift+H/Shift+Vto flip a copy as a sanity check. - To make a tile seamless retroactively, identify the offending edge in the preview, then paint across it.
- Tile preview is just visual — your canvas still has the same dimensions, and exports / save behave as a single tile (not the 3×3).
- Save the preview state with the project (it's persisted in
.mstack), so you can re-open into the same workflow.
Related
- Drawing tools
- Symmetry — combine with tile preview for symmetric repeating textures