Tiling Textures in SU

[Steve Maskery]

Getting realistic wood textures over a large area in SU is not easy. The problem is that the original swatch is usually far too small, maybe just a few square inches. Such a swatch is great if you want to show the detail of a particular timber, for identification, for example, but it's unhelpful if we want to make a large area look realistic.

Short of scanning a long board in sections on my flat-bed scanner, and stitching the images together in PaintShop Pro, which I could do (but I have a life) then we are stuck with small samples, such as this one:

This particular swatch is really not very suitable, as it has a very distinctive figure in the centre which is going to be reproduced over the grid no matter how well we blend the edges, but I've chosen it as it shows up the problems very well.

The first thing we can do is make it bigger, so that there are fewer repetitions over the surface, which is done in a graphics editor such as PSP:

For successful tiling, the left hand edge of the image must follow on seamlessly from the right hand edge, and the top edge seamlessly from the bottom. I'll start with the left to right switch.

First make your canvas bigger, so you have somewhere to put your selection. Select a portion from the left hand side and drag it over to the right:

If I butt the two sections up tight, the new image will tile seamlessly at the edges. Unfortunately there will be an ugly hard line through the image itself, so I have to deal with that.

I do that by using the Cloning tool, and setting the various values to give me a soft edge to my tool, so I can blend the two sections together:

I make the canvas bigger again, this time beyond the bottom edge, and repeat the above procedure, moving the upper portion down to the bottom:

But again we have a hard line across the image:

We blend this away in the same way as before, and then cut away the excess canvas, and we are done.

This is the tileable image:

And this is difference it makes in SU:

It looked fine in PSP, but I can see now that it need a bit more work doing on the blend:

As you can see, it's not perfect, but it's considerably better, don't you think?

If anyone wants to have a go and post a better version, please do so!

 

[Jake]

Neomorph's similar version is here

Together with a couple of readymade examples.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Thanks for the reminder, Jake, that's where I got the original technique.

There are advantages and disadvantages to mirroring, though. The advantage is that there is no blending to do, it is automatically seamless, the downside is that it actually increases the regularity over the board.

 

[andrewm]

Thanks for that Steve.

So that's how it's done. I'm kicking myself now. I had realised that I would need to edit the texture to make it seamless but was wondering how to edit both edges at the same time. I hadn't though of cutting it in tow to edit the centre.

I am sure that I have seen some software some where that allows editing of both edges at the same time but can't for the life of me remember where.

Andrew