How to create tileable and seamless Textures (with gimp)
In this short tutorial i will explain how i create my own tile able textures with gimp.
Lets get started! First you need mediocre weather (ideally found in England or Germany ;) ). No sunshine, no rain, an overcast sky is needed for great shade less textures. Take your camera with you and when seeing a nice texture.. erm.. wall, make sure you keep a distance to the surface of at least 10 meter to make sure, that you don’t get any barrel distortion with your camera.
Here are two examples how not to take source images for your textures:
Sun is shining on the rocks and is creating a strong shadow, when using such a texture the surface won’t match with the lights of the rendered scene.
Here i was to close to the surface and my camera produced a strong barrel distortion. We could remove it later with some manipulation but i prefer shooting undistorted images.
So here is my photo i took for this tutorial, you will notice, that the white balance is off, i just did not noticed that when I was shooting. No worries, this is easy to fix!
1. So in the first step we correct the wrong white balance with the colour balance tool in Gimp.
2. Cool, done that. Looks way better now. In our second step we will now create a 2048×2048 image with Gimp.
3. Copy the corrected large image in that smaller squared empty image.
Move the bigger layer around, til you found a nice looking spot and then apply the image size to the layer size, that both are 2048×2048 big.
4. Now we will offset this layer with the “offset layer” tool on both axis 1024 pixels, there is a button “(x/2), (y/2)” so you don’t have to type in the number :)
Now we can see the seams of the texture, if we would tile it now.
5. To get rid of the tiling i will use now the clone tool and the heal tool. Just pick nice spots of the texture and paint over the Seams. In our example it is pretty hard to close the seams with the predefined brick pattern. Dont be afraid to move stones or to change their shape.
This was the first removal of the seams.
