Hi,
Yeah, it’s possible to make it through vanilla Blender (at least if I get you right). There are few add-ons I’ve just came across that might help you with that as well in terms of simplifying the whole process (just Google it), but aside from that, like I’ve just said before – you can achieve this through vanilla Blender only. Here’s what you would need to do, namely:
- Split your model’s UV into three different areas (zones), namely “head”, “middle”, and “bottom”;
- You can use either a single material (which is the best for tiling control) or multiple ones (head, middle, and bottom accordingly).
In Shading tab, your nodes are gonna look something like this:
Mapping Node → Vector Math → Image Texture.
Now, try to scale your UVs or use math node in order to tile only the center zone. I’m sorry, am not longer near my PC, so I can’t show you all these steps in detail (such as screenshots. etc.)
Hope that helps,
Cheers