Creating and using seamless texture sets

[RobA]

...and delete the selection:


Now keep selecting 200x200px areas from different places in the source image, copy and paste them into new layers. Here I have the initial plus five pasted layers, plus the seamless "frame" we had cut the middle from:


Now reveal one layer at a time through the frame and save the image as a separate png. Because the frame is seamless, and tileable, each one of these will also be seamlessly tilable. Here is a zip of the 6 tiles:
autumn_leaves.zip

...

[RobA]

...Like I said, some programs (dundjinni, mapx, dungeonforge) support random tiles automatically, but Gimp doesn't...

The base seamless tiles would look like this:


Setting the grid to 200px, and turning on snap to grid, I create a new layer and drag in copies of the other tiles, snapping them to the grid:


So when you look at the whole thing you get less periodicity:


One last thing that can be done is to add a B&W overlay. Here I added a gradient to shade the image a bit. This fools the brain and makes the texture look less periodic:


One last note. I showed the cutting out a feathered frame, and using the same frame for all of the tiles. A better method (that I figured out after doing this) would be to use layer masks to randomly mask the outer edges from each of the dragged in copies to expose the seamless tile below. This would give more control to eliminate small inconsistencies or details that would show up periodically, in a non-destructive manner.

-Rob A>

[xv43]

Brilliant! I'm definitely going to have some use for this.