Making of seamless textures

“Making of seamless textures ” by Wojtek “Buddy” Starak
Hi! This is my first tutorial, especially here on 3dtutorials.sk!
I want to show here my technique for making seamless textures for games, also how to create normal and specular maps. To not waste too much time on talkin I’ll start explaining asap. I’m using Photoshop 7.0, so tutorial is mostly for PS users but other applications offer really simmilar tools.
So, first, we need a good photo reference. I used this one straight from www.environment-textures.com

Original size was: 2421x1565px I resized it to: 1200×776.
We need to pick a part of the photo we want to use as a texture, but first we need to select “Rectangular Marquee Tool“

set style to fixed size and set it to 512 px / 512 px

this is the size of the texture we gonna use”, “px” is important here, if we just type 512 selection will be 512 centimeters instead of pixels. Now just click on the photo and move around square marquee, find a good spot to use as center of texture but make sure there’ll be some margins on atleast on vertical and horizontal side of photo, to later use it to fix “seams”. Also try avoiding spots on the texture which are very characteristic, like the yellow stone on that wall, I leaved it in the selection to show later how to fix this.

Ok, when photo spot is found, just click “Ctrl+C” or select Edit->Copy. After this, create new document which will be automaticly in size of copied selection (512x512px), now paste it on the document. (Ctrl+V or Edit->Paste).
Now we need to come back to the photo reference we used, and delete (delete button:) ) this 512×512 selection. When that’s done, we have to, in order to get rid of ugly seams, copy one vertical and horizontal piece of the ref. But before that, we should set “Guide Lines” to help algining “Rectangular Marquee Tool“(this time with normal style) while selecting those margins.
To setup guides: You need to enable “Rulers” (white bars on left and top side of workspace, “Rulers” button is located View Tab). Also to enable Algin/Snap to the Guide Lines, You need to turn on “Snap” located in View tab, make sure that all options in “Snap To” submenu are on. To set the actual guidelines, (lines that help define proportions, use to snap/algin other objects, define exacly distance in cm, meters, pixels and so on.) You just need to drag them out from the white bars on top/left of the workspace, move them to the edges of deleted 512×512 selection, they will align automaticaly!

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