United3dArtists Archive

A while ago somebody, (I think it was the esteemed and prodigious Prodigy), suggested to me that I should read up on how to make seamless textures. I had asked if it was possible to make textures from photos. Yes, I was that far behind...

At the time I was still too engrossed in simply learning how to apply the textures I already had, and I didn't ask where I could find tutorials or hints about it.

I have Gimp, Corel Photo Paint 12, and an ancient version of Photoshop. How ancient? Well, the manual is carved on stone tablets...

Anyway, can anyone point me in the direction of any tutorials about making seamless textures, preferably with the above Applications?

Thanks very much,
Kurt.

Making seamless textures depends from case to case.

Sometimes you have to choose the classical method. This means you grab your source picture, create five layers of it, move four of the copies to the four corners of the pictures, and then you carefully rub away the parts that points into the middle of the picture with the rubber tool. Carefully done you end in a seamless picture. This is the method with most control, but also most work. And you need to know what you`re doing.

The Gimp has a seamless tool onboard. You can find this filter in image menu under Filters->Map->Make Seamless. This tool does basically the same. But it blends gradientally out towards the center. Sometimes useful, most of the times the result is useless though. It is seamless then, but also very patterned.

Then there are my two favourite plugins for The Gimp. The one is called Texturize. The other is called Resynthesize. Both can be found at the Gimp Plugin Page: http://registry.gimp.org/" . Or have a look here: http://gimp-texturize.sourceforge.net/index.html" and here: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer"

Hope that helps

Tiles wrote:Making seamless textures depends from case to case.

Sometimes you have to choose the classical method. This means you grab your source picture, create five layers of it, move four of the copies to the four corners of the pictures, and then you carefully rub away the parts that points into the middle of the picture with the rubber tool. Carefully done you end in a seamless picture. This is the method with most control, but also most work. And you need to know what you`re doing.

The Gimp has a seamless tool onboard. You can find this filter in image menu under Filters->Map->Make Seamless. This tool does basically the same. But it blends gradientally out towards the center. Sometimes useful, most of the times the result is useless though. It is seamless then, but also very patterned.

Then there are my two favourite plugins for The Gimp. The one is called Texturize. The other is called Resynthesize. Both can be found at the Gimp Plugin Page: http://registry.gimp.org/" . Or have a look here: http://gimp-texturize.sourceforge.net/index.html" and here: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer"

Hope that helps

That sure does help, Tiles. Thanks a lot.

To answer the obvious question, I've had Gimp for a while, but hardly used it. Got so many graphics apps now I hardly know which one to play with next!!

I'll go get those plugins now. Thanks for the link.

Cheers,
Kurt

So, from what I read, a seamless texture is just a picture of a random pattern that's been enlarged by being copied and pasted to itself, with some attempt to manipulate the copy so you can't see where the it joins the original.

That's pretty straightforward. I used to do stuff like that in good ol' Photoshop just for the heck of it. Just to see how convincing I could get it.

Blending a seamless texture with another image can help give some randomness to the texture overall so a repeating pattern is harder to see plus adding another layer of dirt, bump/normal maps also goes a long way. For me, the texturing part can take way longer then the modeling part, more like 80% of the work is dealing with materials and lighting for many projects I've done or attempted.