Eliminating tiling effects

(Machine for to kill) #1

I’m interested in tips and tricks on eliminating texture tiling effects. Especially when it comes to texturing terrain. I could go through each single surface and shift it and scale it so that no 2 surfaces are the same but I think that would be a ridiculously long process and I’m sure there are better methods out there. I’m also not really good at photoshop (Even though I have a book for it) so I can’t do most of the hibbi jibby that some people talk about. But you know, if you (especially the developers) could give me some general advice on how to get rid of the tiled look it would be super. I mean I’ve looked at the hills on fuel dump and they are completely seamless. I actually looked hard to find the spot where the textures tiled but I couldn’t find it. Anyway long story short please help.

P.S.
I am aware of blending effects to go from one texture to the other, however these aren’t really usefull if you’re doing a large pavement for example that needs to use the same texture throughout.

(Stektr33) #2

I still consider myself quite a n00b at graphics,etc. , but here’s what I usually do, and it works for me.

  1. Break up the image into 4 quadrants, top right (TR), top left (TL), bottom right (BR) and bottom left (BL).
  2. I then swap the quadrants around, so the tiling effect becomes visible.
    So basically:
    TR image goes to BL quadrant
    TL image goes to BR quadrant
    BR image goes to TL quadrant
    BL image goes to TR quadrant

What I tend to do is have four layers of the texture, and shift each one accordingly and then flatten them out (ex. with a 512x512 image I will shift Layer 1 -256, -256, Layer 2 256,-256…you get the idea)

The edges of your overall texture should now match when you have them side by side or top to bottom.

  1. From here, you can see the tiling effect right in the center. Depending on your texture, you can either blur/blend it out OR take little chunks of your image and stick it where the lines are, and then blur/blend it out. The point being, that since you can see the lines for your tile, you can now manipulate it.

That’s just the way I do it now.

(Shallow) #3

Stektr33: Assuming you’re using photoshop, the easiest way to start off getting rid of tiling is Filter -> Offset, then using the clone brush to copy other bits of the texture over the seams. How careful you are when doing this will depend on the kind of texture you are working with.

After that, try it tiled, see where the repeats are, and deal with as you see fit. You can try the high pass filter to help even out obvious repeats from dark/light areas.

There’s more to it than that obviously, but I imagine if you Google for the terms I’ve used you’ll find more detailed directions.

Machine: Are you texturing your terrain face by face in radiant instead of using an alphamap and metashader?

(Stektr33) #4

Actually I’m using Fireworks ATM (lost my damn PS disc) after deinstalling it, after attempting to commit to Macromedia products. Oh well, I’ll find that little b00ger. I’ll research your post and see what equivalents there are for Fireworks.

Does anybody else have any suggestions or tricks? I’m very interested in what else everybody does.

(Machine for to kill) #5

I messed around with this a bit and it works pretty well. I think this technique is best for terrains and such (which is what I wanted) but I think it might not work as well for patterned textures like brick walls and what have you.

Thanks to everyone for their tips.

(Machine for to kill) #6

Well i tried to use easygen for the terrain but i cant seem to be able to make the textures appear in the editor(or the game) after they’re applied in easygen. Anyway I know, I gotta read some more about metashaders and what have you, but any sugestions or links to tutorials on how to do these things(especially terrain texturing) are greatly appreciated.

(Blackadder_NZ) #7

Speaking of Easygen… does anyone know what the problem is when I get told Error: ******** MAX_SPAWN_VARS

I did a quick google search and all I came up with was 2 sites with the Quake 3 Source… :S

(Machine for to kill) #8

ok let’s not deviate from the subject. I’m still trying to get some good advice on getting rid of tiling

P.S.
I think you max spawn thingy has something to do with the map size (too big). I think I’ve read something in this forum about it but I don’t remember the thread or a good search string.

(Stektr33) #9

This site helped me get going with easygen, particularly the initial setup.
http://www.wolfensteinx.com/surface/tutorials/easygen.html

Make sure you’re running EasyGen 1.42 which allows you to use metashader templates for ET. Don’t know much more than that.
Go to http://digilander.libero.it/ilbanca/ if you don’t have the latest version and those ET templates or don’t know how to get those templates into EasyGen.

After you get all that going, follow the first link I sent you, except, the 1.42 version has a Templates dropdown and make sure you select ET from it.