Making Seamless textures

this is best viewed on the forums

Anyways, on to the tutorial. This is by "justanother1" and is being added by Chocolatepie33.

Part 1: Seamless/Height

• for this tutorial I'm using Paint.NET along with several of the plugins. I can't remember which plugin was in which pack so you'll need to get several ( You should get them all anyway, their free and very useful). The image I used is a free wallpaper found here. I brought the image into Paint.NET and cropped it down to an area I like toward the upper right hand corner and resized to 512x512. Your crop doesn't have to be exactly square, but try and get it close so there's not too much stretching. Then I duplicated the Layer so I have two to work with.

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• On the bottom layer I used the Seamless Texture Creator plugin from the Effects-Distortions menu, using the Seamless Texture Helper setting. What this does is swap the upper right quarter and the lower left quarter, and the upper left quarter to the lower right quarter. but it leaves an ugly cross in the middle, this is what the top layer is for.

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• On the top layer we'll use the eraser tool around all the edges except in the middle where the cross is. You can erase more or less, the trick is to find areas where the two layers will blend nicely. Finally use the magic wand selection tool to select all the transparent areas, the INVERT your selection, and use the Effects-Selection-Feather Selection plugin. I use the full 10 setting. this will transparent the edges and help it blend nicer. Then flatten and save your Seamless texture. Then we'll need a Heightmap. Start by using the Black and White function in the Adjustments menu, then add a new layer for touch ups. The height map is a depth representation on a greyscale. However darker colors will show up as depth in the wrong area, so we'll use a lighter grey color and paint in those areas, then use Effects-Blurs-Guassian blur and Layer transparency to blend it in.

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Part 2: Normal

• Once you have a good height map You can flatten and save that out ....

Then Use any of the Normal Map plugins to make your Normal Map. You may want to play around with the Adjustments-Brightness and Contrast on your Height-Map before using a Normal Map plugin, depending on the Images you use, and you may want to jump into Sandbox and see the outcome of your textures before closing Paint.NET.

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• I've found as a rule of thumb, Your Normal should look just Opposite of what it will do in a game engine, cracks will look like veigns popping out, and rocks will look like caves.

Here's the final result ...

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