• Register
Post tutorial Report RSS Photo to Seamless texture

How to make a seamless/well tiling texture from a photo and add additional parts to make the texture "your own".

Posted by on - Basic Textures

The tutorial goes through the process of making a seamless texture out of a photo found on the all beloved cgtextures.com. Also meaning making it tilable and removing noticeable repetitive marks.


You need to atleast have a basic understanding of photoshop and it helps to know the hotkeys, even if I mention all I use. But this tutorial should fit perfectly for beginners I believe.

Post comment Comments
ambershee
ambershee

Alternatively of course, a person can use GIMP and press the 'Make Seamless' button without the need for photoshop, and it does the same thing in a few seconds ;)

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
AniCator
AniCator

It doesn't work that well when you have photos of brick walls for example.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
hushpuppy
hushpuppy

Errhm does this work with tiles?

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
DazJW
DazJW

Making it seamless doesn't necessarily make it tile well.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
formerlyknownasMrCP
formerlyknownasMrCP

Don't I know that ;).. it takes a lot of skill to avoid patterning. Seamless on the edges but also seamless in the texture itself, its not easy.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
ger
ger

I use a photoshop 6.0 plugin called DCspecial.PatternEditDo (and undo) for this. It just switches the texture so you can edit it by hand. Been using it for a long time and found nothing better yet than doing them by hand, and this plugin makes the set up very quick.

I didn't read the tutorial yet, I hope I'm not repeating what it's in it. :)

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
Garrador Author
Garrador

quote: Making it seamless doesn't necessarily make it tile well.

WEll thats the point of the tutorial, making it seamless AND tile well. Removing repeative marks etc. I guess I had to state that too =P Ill edit the post.

Reply Good karma+4 votes
Varsity
Varsity

Why not upload this as a video in the first place? :p

Moddb.com

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
Garrador Author
Garrador

Im sorry, what you mean? =P

Reply Good karma+2 votes
Garrador Author
Garrador

ooh, I didnt know about that. Thanks

Reply Good karma+2 votes
fox01313
fox01313

This is a good tutorial but here are a few shortcuts based on what I know of photoshop that might help people out. In the filters on the later versions of photoshop under the Other catagory is an offset filter. To me it seems to be in the wrong spot but it's a great tool, with game textures being 256, 512 or 1024 pixels square usually, for the image just crop it down to the size you need & put half that amount in the offset filter. Later versions of photoshop have a healing brush (with 100% opacity & hard edge) which is a great little digital blender at getting rid of the seams. Just like Garrador pointed out with the stamp tool, keep the brush small as the healing brush tends to go a little crazy at times so be prepared to undo occasionally. Either tool will work for this, just depends on what works best for you.

Also from the book 'The Dark Side of Game Texturing' by David Franson there is a tip in that book to take this one step further. Take the seamless texture, duplicate the image, then make a border with a feathered edge (experiment with the size on how big the border is & feather range). What you want is to keep the border that is seamless & feather/delete the inside. From this you can put in other items in photoshop that blend with the other textures. The example he used in the book was making a castle rock wall seamless, then making a few variants with different decorations in the wall.

Hope this helps & makes some sense to other cg artists looking at this, have fun.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+3 votes
fox01313
fox01313

Didn't get to edit this in the 5 min time limit, after offsetting the image, clean up the seams & then offset it again to reset the position of the image. From that it's ready to go.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
Nightshade
Nightshade

Well, it's good effort but this is definetly not the best way to make seamless texturesl. All the automatic actions and plugins, etc I've tried, have been flawed. It's better to just make it seamless manually by your own. But anyway: just like fox01313 says, using the Offset filter under (Filter -> Other -> Offset) is much better than making the canvas larger and duping your texture. Offset your 512x512 px texture 256px in both directions and you will get the seam as a cross in the middle of the picture. Then use either the Clone Stamp Tool or the Heal Brush Tool (Not the spot heal brush). I prefer the clone stamp tool because you can set the opacity and flow of that one - which you can't with the heal brush.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
Post a comment

Your comment will be anonymous unless you join the community. Or sign in with your social account: