dealing with the "tiling effect"

I'm currently building a castle, and I have a stone texture I bought that I really like using. It is seemless, but when I repeat it out a few times across a castle wall you can obviously see a tiling effect. I'm interested in strategies to minimize or eliminate this visual problem. Here are some thoughts I had.

- Reduce the repeats, so there is less tiling (still happens, just less so).

- Add extra "areas" (perhaps with other textures) to help "break up" the sea of tiles. This could be a tower in the middle of a wall for instance.

- Make my own textures or edit the texture I have to make some variations. I think I've heard of other people making a few variations on a common texture to help with this problem. Unfortunately, I'm not very texture savvy, so this would require a good amount of investment to learn first.

- Use another texture with a more uniform pattern.

Any suggestions, tips, or tricks?

The only "certain" fix is to use a more uniform texture. When you tile a lot of times, any aspect that is not uniform starts to stand out, a lot.

If you can find a set which has several textures designed to tile seamlessly not only to themselves, but to each other, you can use a variety of textures on different prims, reducing the obvious repeats.

You can also overlay an alpha texture fo something like Ivy or vines over a 24-bit wall texture, masking the regularity of the repeats.

This has come up before, it is called the banding effect.

In the post I saw Chosen Few left this link.

The Power of the High Pass Filter

If you have photoshop or any other graphics editor with a high pass filter, your all set to go.

After having wrote that I remembered that some of the filters that come with PS are copyrighted to PS. So in the event you do not have PS and or are looking for a lower budget solution then you can download the free open source graphics editor called "Gimp"
Which you can get from here.
Gimp

Then I searched to see if there was a plug in for high pass for gimp. And sure enough there is!
High Pass

Scroll down to where it says attachment there is a High Pass link.

You should probably read the bit of text there as well. You will most likely want "Preserve DC" mode.

I spend a little time each day cooking Stone Walls so I always look at this carefully, I see a lot of this, specially in the cheaply made textures that are being sold in huge packs that sell for way too much money. If you are lucky you will get a few that will look good by accident. ( Those are the same ones that you will see used by thousands of other people too)

The real deal is that some surfaces just are not meant to tile endlessly and be smooth looking, but for cartoon building Here is what I found:

Too little content and high repeat rate in a stone wall will make a stone texture very mechanical and super UN-realistic. If the pattern is simple, this will also make the stone look blah and boring. If the pattern has any kind of shading you will get the banding. ( Square small textures with only a few Stones that repeat endlessly look like hell, even though they are more "seamless"

and NO ! you cannot get rid of the banding by filtering it, it comes directly from the subject and the more you filter the luminance or levels the more you wash it out, hence making it look like anything but a stone wall.


I now tend to work with as large of an area as possible. The best shape for a realistic looking Stone Wall is usually a Horizontal rectangle. Most walls are not as tall as they are wide. Most will need a horizontal Border to break up the vertical pieces, because those will be more obvious. ( A stone wall in RL never repeats exactly and you will never find huge verticals without any other stuff going on (!)

Ceera is most correct with her second note, it really helps if you have a set of textures that all tiles to each other seamlessly rather than repeating over and over, you can then stagger, stretch several textures to make them look super real.

The bottom line is that unless you have many hours to make your own, do not expect to find a great castle wall texture in a multi pack. Truly good looking stone textures take forever to make and are like a lucky accident in most cases. Even some " Castle Builders" with sims full of castles still have not found one single decent looking stone wall, while there are one or 2 that seem to have nothing but great textures. I bet that they do not sleep and definetly do not get out much.

I would only call 1 out of about 10 or more that I try to make excellent, while maybe 1 out of a 100 will be superb.

I'm no graphics genius by any stratch, but I tend to make my own. Look for public license/ open to use images online, and use something liek Gimp (open source image software).

I put all the elements I want into an image file, then slice it up and save and upload each part seperately so there's one texture per prim, and they all (sort of, prim edges never seem to vanish completely from sight) go back together like a jigsaw on what I've built.

More time consuming and expensive (lots of uploads) than getting packs on slx (or xstreet as it prefers to be known) in in world, but also means it's your own work - Well,. apart form teh images you've hacked around to include in it!

I recently make a series of repeatable stone walls for a Folly (like castle walls) and my first upload, I realised that while the horizontal repeat was perfect, the vertical repeat was a couple of pixels off, so I corrected it, but I went back to the slightly imperfect set because it actually broke the banding effect up and looked much better, you can only see the imperfection if you zoom in to a couple of places.

Stone walls are really "organic" - you would be surprised what works sometimes. I sometimes leave blatant mistakes because they tend to make magic lol