The June Free For All

[gare]

The topic is textures; we use them in just about every app, and this month presents a challenge/opportunity to strut your prowess to the group and generate (or retrieve from your archives) some really good textures!

How about some conditions:

?Dont't post a preset, that is, create, scan, or draw a texture you can call your own. I know that PS and Xara ship with oodles of nifty fills, but we've been there, alright?

?Try to make the textures seamless, so they can tile when repeated. Part of the object this month is to swap textures; I'm always hungry to use fresh and new stuff myself.

?Try generating an alpha along with your texture to use as either a transparency or bump map. PS's Lighting Effects filter produces some terrific embossed work through reading a bump map.

To kick things off, here's a submission or three.

My Best,

Gare

[p?tr?]

Hey gare, great patterns. ;)
I'm having trouble getting my patterns to match up when repeating.
I finnaly got it to work, but it takes me some time.
Got any tips/techniques on making repeating patterns. \:]

Here's a wood texture I made, although it doesn't repeat.
http://photobucket.com/albums/y227/p...rrent=wood.jpg

[gare]

Hi, p?tr??k---

Very nice tones! Okay, tiling requires that first the texture scene is lit evenly; you got a hot spot in your wood at upper right. Making the image tile seamlessly is then quite simple; you use the Filter>Other>Offset command, specify that Wrap Around is enabled, and then X and Y offset the sucker by about half the overall image dimensions.

Doing this will most likely put a "crease" in the center of your texture-what you need to do then is use the Clone Stamp tool to sample from contiguous areas, and clone into and away the crease.

Here's an example using a tonally smooth area of your wood texture. Oh, yeah...and get artistic when you clone; try to match up color areas in your texture.

;)

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

OK, here are two tiling patterns. The first started with a scan of Zebrawood which I did sometime ago as part of a collection of wood scans. The second is just a vaguely 3D-esque bit of Photoshoppery.

[sPECtre]

To even out the lighting of the textures, the high pass filter is useful see these tuts:

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/...exture_tiling/

and especially this one: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20.../hajba_pfv.htm

[gare]

I really like your "weave" texture! And the links you provided should encourage more entries this month, too! The zebrawood is nicely done; care to describe how you did it?

Here's an example of how a mask channel can help texture models. I created the basket weave in Aldus TextureMaker, and yes, my choice of models is inappropriate--try it on a basket or chair seat or something.

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

Hi Gare,

That Zebrawood tiling pattern was done in a Mac program called Texture Magic which has been around for at least 10 years. Here's a screen shot in which I've just pasted a selection from my original scan. The actual paste is inside the lines which extend inward from the edges of the window. They allow you to see how the tiling is working on all edges. Then you use the clone tool to manipulate the image until it tiles properly. It's very simple and extremely handy but the program is a throwback to yesteryear although it was updated for OS X. It still uses PICTs as the format of choice.

[Welles]

While we're at it. Many of AlienSkin's plugs have options for tiling patterns. Here are two. The buttons one is from Splat. The rock wall is from EyeCandy 5: Textures > Stone Wall.

[gare]

Nice rock wall, Welles!

I'd never heard of the texture program for the Mac, but Alien Skin 5000 sure looks interesting. About ten years ago, Virtus (a liesure service of director John Cameron) gifted me with a nifty Mac program that they bought from Alien Skin: Textureshop. Unfortunately, it won't run under Tiger, but I still have OS 8 running on my PPC.

It's very theraputic, Textureshop is; I can mutate for hours on end. They're procedural textures, nothing real world, but as fractals, you can zoom and scale variations.

My Best,

Gare

[gare]

If you're a dad, or you have a dad, today's your day! I'm using the textures thread, 'cause I used a texture for everyone's card!

My Best,

Gare