What is the best way to make seamless textures?

Hey all

I have been wondering about that for quite a while... I have lots of plugins for seamless but what they do is - blur the borders and that's about all. When the textures is uploaded in SL, seams are still very muchi visible... Cutting half of the texture and flipping it horizontally is another way but I find it creates ugly patterns, especially when you deal with brick. Then, there is the case of seamless patterns repeating too much... How do we fix that?

So my question is: What is the best way you have found for making seamless textures from rel photos or just a texture generated under photoshop?

The offset filter (filter>other>offset) and the rubber stamp are your friends. Offset your image by half the pixels. If your image is 512x512 then offset by 256 width and 256 height. You can see how your tiles will join. Use the rubber stamp with a soft brush to stamp over seams at 100% opacity. Then set opacity to about 25% - 50% to blend any soft seams you have created using the stamp.

If your photo has uneven lighting you will need to even it out first. A simple way to do this is with dodge and burn tools set to low opactity and even out the lighting by eye. After this is done, reducing contrast can help make the tiling look more natural.

Sounds like an original way to do it I'll try it!

Paint Shop Pro can do it automatically. You can get old versions for free at http://www.oldversion.com

Thanks for sharing your tips.
I often stuck with seams not always sure how to get rid of them.

The offset in filter for some may be a little confusing subject to the dimensions of your layer/picture or texture.

Another simple option to test is create 2 copies, move 1 up and the other down so the bottom of 1 will meet the top of the other. Likewise for the sides move one left, the other right and the left side should join the right side.

1 problem that may occur in some software programs is when you have copied or copy merged your textures onto a new layer, they may appear to fit that layer, but not always. To check this create a background layer and fill it with a colour that will show through, for example yellow, by clicking that layer to show or hide you may see that the borders do not fill the actual layer and you will see a very faint yellow line around some or all edges. If the texture is fairly simple, then perhaps stretching it on all sides a fraction may overcome this problem. Disable "snap" to when doing this as you only want to stretch it a fraction.
If the texture is complexed then your back to either using burn and dodge tools, various brushes or perhaps some kind of plugin.
The easiest textures to design and practice making seamless are brick walls or tiles. These can be made from scratch and are very simple to learn and practice with.

Nicole, if you upload a texture and you only want to view it on a prim as the whole picture, in other words, you do not repeat it so repeats per face for both Horizontal and Vertical in the texture edit menu will show 1.000 then change those values to 0.995 or even to 0.990. this should be enough to rid the seams. If however you are going to repeat the texture there is nothing in SL that will allow you to make it seamless, you can only go back to PS and redo it.

Seamless or non seamless patterns only repeat if the Repeat values per face are higher than 1.00 in either direction. so if you set this to 2.000 horizontally and the Horizontal Offset to 0.500 or -0.500 you will get your texture repeated 2 times and it will be centred on the prim. Any numbers below the repeat value of 1.000 will only stretch your texture and make it larger.

Here's a link to a visual tutorial for Photoshop:

/109/de/25305/1.html

There are two methods I usually use, depending on the project. The fist one was already described quite well by Sylvia, offset the image by 50% and then use the clone stamp to paint out the seams. The other is slightly different. Duplicate the layer, offset the duplicate by 50%, and then erase the seams with a layer mask (you could use the eraser instead of the mask if you want, but the mask has the advantage of being nondestructive, so you can easily fix mistakes or make changes at any time.) The erased parts will let the original un-offest layer show through from below, so there will be no seams anywhere.

I think I use the second method more often these days than the first. It's just personal preference. I like the nondestructiveness of it. Either way works just fine.



There's no shortage of plugins to automate the process in Photoshop as well, or it's easy enough to record an action that will do the same thing. I'm not a fan of any of that though. Here's why.

The problem, whether we're talking PS, PSP, or any other program, is that the software can never judge intelligently what looks good and what doesn't. For fairly uniform textures, like a swatch of simple fabric or a patch of sand, the automation tends to work just fine. However, for anything with more complex, distinctive shapes in it, like a covering of fallen leaves or a paisley pattern or a jigsaw puzzle, it takes a human artist to figure out how to make it work. Leave it to the machine, and you'll end up with weird blending in places, as the machine won't know how to something like trace around the shape of a leaf instead of bulldozing straight through it.

In other words, for good tiling, knowing what NOT to blend is as important as knowing to do the blending itself. Unfortunately, all the computer will ever know is the latter. It takes a human to make decisions about the former.

One thing you have to watch out for is lighting. if the original texture has uneven lighting, then the tiled version will show a pattern no matter how well you hide the seams.

Even more subtle is lens distortion. Here is an extreme example. Suppose you take a picture using a fish-eye lens of an otherwise perfect tiled pattern. When you try to tile it there will be a pattern caused by the distortion of the fish eye.

The problem is that even a little bit of this kind of distortion, invisible to the eye, shows up horribly when you tile lots of copies.

The techniques listed here are what I use...

However, instead of using the burn/dodge tool to even out lighting, a good way to do it is this:

Create a second layer identical to the first layer--take this layer and use the filter which produces a negative of the image...jeepers, I'm not at home and can't remember what it's called...posterize or something.

Once you've done that, you're going to bring down the opacity on the layer with the posterization. You'll want to bring it down to a point where not all the detail is gone, but the lighting is flat across the whole thing--once you're happy with the detail, you're going to merge down the two layers.

Don't be afraid of what you see here...the color is going to be muted and strange...but that's where the post production comes in--you're going to layer adjust the colors and levels now...if done properly you can get the color to nearly match the original texture.

Fool around with adjustments until you're happy with the color and contrast...it takes a little practice, but works well once you're savvy.

Savvy?

The dude who wrote the algorithms for this graphics utility is clearly a genius:
http://www.seamlesstexturegenerator.com/

Don't know if its been mentioned yet, but the highpass filter is awesome for 'evening out' textures that have visually repeating areas of light and dark so they tile more smoothly. Say you have a rock face texture with a darker area on it, that dark spot will noticeably repeat if you make a giant wall with it. Using the highpass filter will even out the dark spot, and then you can go back and readjust the contrast / color to normal, and get a rock texture that is even tone.

The highpass filter does sometimes create a light fringe around the edge, so its better to do this before the offset method so you can then paint/stamp over those parts.