how to deal with repetitions in textures

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have any tips on making textures look more real rather than a repetitive texture?

[owen]

A couple of tips:

1. Use large / hi-res texture maps that cover a larger area of material so that the amount of tiling is reduced. Most of the textures that come with ArchiCAD are very low-res by Arch viz standards.

2. Try and avoid textures with noticable features ('spots') if they are going to be frequently tiled. These will really standout as a grid when the texture tiles.

There is a great application called ImageSynth which comes as a PS plugin or stand-alone app that can be used to create great high res tiling textures from smaller samples which work without needing to use the mirror texture options in ArchiCAD.

[Dwight]

Amateurish textures have two problems:

they aren't "Seamless"
They pulse or spot or whatever.

Photoshop has an offset command that puts image edges together. It is then possible to clone over edges to make the appearance of a seamless image. A craft.

Pulsing is harder to fix.
- an element of the texture map is distinct - knock it back - easy to do.

-the light on the image was uneven so the cross fade of color shows the tile. - very hard to balance this type of image. The pulsing comes from variations in background color.

A solution to this cross fade problem is complex but do-able:
Instead of considering the image as the texture, consider the image merely as a bump map or pattern guide. Get rid of the bad color.

•De-saturate
•make new layer behind
•increase contrast and lighten image to show more white background
•knock out the white to reveal back ground layer
•add color to background layer.

On a brick wall, this would give the impression of a painted wall. If you want to draw in the mortar joints as a contrasting color, it helps...

Another solution is to artificially build complexity into the texture.
Lay out a number of texture repetitions [already made seamless] in one Photoshop file. Mix and match parts until the assembly itself is unique.

This is equal to making a bigger texture so repeating is less noticed.

A rule of texture thumbing is that the more natural variation in a surface material the larger [more area] a sampled texture map must gather.

For example, I was once sent a small sample of a boulder wall - irregular boulders, blobby mortar. Probably done by this guy:

http://www.rense.com/ufo6/manson.htm

It was impossible to make a seamless perfect image map.
What we should have done is taken a perfect photo of a large stone wall and made a high res texture of that.

I am just beginning to address textures in my "The Artlantis Attitude" project. Even many of the commercial Artlantis textures/Shaders show this tiling problem, so a fellow needs to be good with the image editor - an essential skill.

[David Collins]

I suspect the tiny low resolution bitmap stamp is a relic from the days of seriously handicapped computer memory. I've been using increasing larger bitmaps in recent years, sometimes as large as 4000 x 4000, and I haven't found the memory ceiling yet. I'm sure it slows rendering down a bit, but not nearly as much as gigazillions of polygons and light sources.

[Mats_Knutsson]

The larger photo used for the texture the less editing you need to do. I attach an example of a cedar texture I did for AC12 swe. The original photo covers about 4*3 metres and the patterns and sport are often not that significant when the texture is used on walls smaller than that. I'm still (always) learning how to make textures. It's great fun but takes time. It's a craft as Dwight says and that's why you have to pay some money to the craftsmen.

[Ralph Wessel]

richgwilt wrote:
Does anyone have any tips on making textures look more real rather than a repetitive texture?

I wrote some tips for this here