Friday, October 24, 2008

Creating tiled textures

Friday October 24, 2008

Greetings! It's Friday night and time once more for my weekly share of artistic and technical rants and ravings. The topic for tonight is graphic and focus will be on creating tiled textures. I've been making a number of seamless tiled textured to use as repeating backgrounds. Repeating patterns are also useful as textures for 3D models. To create a repeating pattern I usually start with a blank page of any dimensions. Next do some drawing or cut and paste images onto your blank slate. If your paint program has built in rendering you can use that feature to generate a semi-random pattern. Now it's time to make the picture seamless. Shift the image by about half the width and height. The “break” should now be visible in the middle. There are a few different ways to smooth the image. You can use a smear or smudge brush to blend the edges. You can also cut and paste small bits of the image over the edge area. Use your imagination and the tools in your particular art program. It's rather satisfying to roll your own tiled textures. Give it a try!

The picture of the week was created using Bryce.

Click on the image for a full-sized view


The loops of the week are some more dynamic drum parts.


Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.

Bye for now!