...Continued from Seamlessly Tilable Textures - Part 1

Now they tile seamlessly, and that is all good, but it is not good enough in most cases. We can quickly see that a not very naturally looking pattern quickly generates as the textures are tiled. That will ruin the look of the textured surface, so we must do something to stop that. In fact the more distinct, detailed and interesting an image is the more and stronger patterns it will generate when it is tiled. Sadly. Also the more times an image is tiled, the more visible the patterns will be.

These 2 images are both tiled 3x3. And I guess I don't have to point out where details become recurring lines and so on. As you can see, either method generates these recurring patterns, which effectively ruins the realism and suspense of disbelief.

Method 1

Method 2

Like I said, the more distinctive features and details an image has, which also makes it a lot more interesting to look at, the stronger patterns it will generate.

So what to do? Remove all detail from your image till you have a 50% grey texture?

No. We will use a nifty little technique to combat the worst of the pattern generating.

Open your texture image if you don't have already.

Grab and drag the background layer down onto the New Layer icon. Drag the new layer called Background Copy to the top of the layer stack. Now go to Filter - Other - High Pass.

The High Pass dialogue box will come up. Put in a radius which is bigger than the smallest details you wish to preserve. In this case I opted for 30-something. Hit okay.

Now change the blend mode from Normal to Luminosity. This will allow your detail to stay intact but still make the colour differences across the texture smaller and less obvious.

As a last detail I change the opacity of the Background Copy layer to around 70%. You can flatten the image now if you want.

When you tile the image nine times like before, we have a much less visible pattern, but have retained a fair bit of the details still.

Keep experimenting with the settings and parametres in this tutorial to get an effect you are happy with; this has just been a rough guideline.

Enjoy.

(We still have a few things we can do to improve the look of this texture, when it is tiled a number of times. But this time we need to change to the 3D realm.)

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