Quote Originally Posted by Meshon View Post
I'd definitely be interested to hear more about how you converted the seamless textures to vector.
The technique I used in this map is one that I don't think I'd use again. I used a totally different technique for my later Goth Gulgamel battlemaps. Also, more recent versions of Illustrator make this significantly easier than it was when I built this map.

Basic technique was to get a raster seamless texture, and paste it into Illustrator. Select it and autotrace it. You need to play with the autotrace settings to get a decent conversion. There is a definite tradeoff between size and quality here. With the autotrace done, select the result and build a pattern brush out of it. You can then use this brush to fill anything, and get a vector pattern that repeats.

This seriously bloats the resulting file.

In more recent work, I haven't bothered with this. Since Illustrator now lets you make pattern brushes out of raster bitmaps, it's easier just to get a large texture, scale it down to be in the 300dpi range or so, then build a pattern brush out of it. Not pure vector, but since the bitmap is only stored once and drawn when needed, it still keeps the file slim.