[Award Winner] Tutorial on how to create seamless textures out of anything

I am going to post my tried and trusted way of creating seamless textures out of any photo that has some basic properties in PSP but I would think any significant paint package should be fine.

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##### See lower down this tutorial for a script to automate all of this process including the image flattening to give a uniform brightness ######
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The basic property is that the pattern on the image has an interesting texture that has basically uniform brightness across it. Now I have a tool to force images to become steady brightness so I can do any image but without this you will have to find some photo that matches this property and that is not a significant limitation.

So here is a photo I took in a park. I am notorious for taking photos of interesting plants in garden centers ! A great free resource if you ask me !

Stage 1. Chop out the texture bit and try to ensure that the edges are roughly the same brightness.

Stage 2. Resample to a convenient size like 1024x1024. Then create a new image double size e.g. 2048x2048 and paste in the first into 4 quadrants of the second ensuring that its exactly in the corners and lined up.

Stage 3. Keep the original cut one handy and get out the freehand selection tool or it might be called the lasso tool. In PSP you need to set the options of this to make the freehand selection feather something quite large like 80 or 100 or about 10 - 20% of the size of the image.

Now cut a shape out of the first original cut image with this kind of pattern, copy that and paste it over the vertical joins of the quadrant image such that the top dumbell end is one quarter way down the vertical join so that the bottom of the dumbell is at the three quarter way down the vertical join. You may need more than one paste to cover the vertical seam.

Like this :-

Stage 4. Repeat using a new selection in the horizontal direction to cover the horizontal seam.

Stage 5. Cut out the middle 1024x1024 (or the original size of image). The easiest way to do this is to use the Image/Canvas Size and set it to 1024x1024 and ask it to center it with the two check boxes.

Your done. There is an optional stage if you like...

Stage 6. You may if you desire cut out the center circle of your original image and blend this over the final image. Dont touch the edges of course as they are now nicely tiled.

Anyway, to see what this image looks like tiled. This is a 3x3 tile of the image.

I have been using this technique for years and it always works. Some images don't like to be tiled and you have to munge them a bit but in general this is a fail safe way of taking texture sources and getting them seamless.

Like I mentioned at the start you need to keep the overall tone uniform for it not to repeat. Using my internal program I can generate this image and tile it 3x3 like this which allows a better look. If you want me to run this for a texture you have then email me and ill do that for you, but if your careful then you wont need it.

One final note. You can do this with 3D objects too. I originally developed this photo technique from adapting it from a 3D object tutorial on the web somewhere. You can create a pavement by creating paved tiles as 3D objects then taking the right hand side paving stones of a patch and placing them on the left and vice versa and then also for the top and bottom then slice the 3D object in a square cutting the edge paving slabs into halves and then your 3D bit of paving can be tiled.

End of tutorial - any questions or comments ?

Good Tut, Redrobes - have some REP! I've got to give this technique a try.