Know of a freeware seamless texture tool? (Details inside)

[Ampa]

Hello folks, thought I'd pick the collective mind...

I am looking for a program to turn a photo into a seamless tilable texture.

Requirements...

• Either a Photoshop plugin or stand alone
• Should work from a range of common image formats - JPG PNG GIF
• Allows for large(ish) textures - many apps seem limited to 256x256 or there abouts
• Freeware

I have searched this evening and did find...

Texture Maker (Demo of commercial app - free for non-commercial work) [Limited to 512x512 pixels]
Redfield Seamless Workshop (Freeware) - utterly incomprehensible interface, could produce nothing worth looking at!

Any ideas?

Thanks

Ampa

[rjbull]

Don't have a direct answer, but a great source of free software suggestions, especially for graphics and the Web, is Ken Laninga's list,  http://www.sticksite.com/freesoft.htm ; Maybe Background Magic from his Page 2, or Reptile from Page 3, would suit?

[Ampa]

rjbull: Thanks for the input. However...

Reptile - I know from the distant past. It is a proceedural generator that creates tiles from an algorithm rather than a photographic source. Think mid 90's garish website backgrounds!

Background Magic - I don't know, but the homepage is defunct, just full of spam content I did find one screenshot via google, and it looked pretty terrible!

Ampa

[tinjaw]

Sorry Ampa, I do not know of any freeware apps that do what you want. But in case anybody else stumbles upon this thread and isn't restricted to freeware, I am aware of another:

Seamless Texture Generator

I also use a filter to generate camouflage patterns:

http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins_camouflage.html

[Nighted]

Texture Processor

[high voltage]

sTile may be what you're looking for.  http://www.harmware.net/stile.htm

[mouser]

hello high voltage, and welcome to the site.
stile looks nice.  screenshot:

[gjehle]

i'm not sure but i think that the gimp comes with a script or filter that can do it.
never used it

[Nudel]

Since you're already using Photoshop by the sound of it, I think there's a feature built into Photoshop (I think it was added in version 7, if not in CS2) for making tiled backgrounds.

I haven't really played with it myself (if only I had the time to read through the whole PS manual and learn all the features!) so I don't know how well it will work. From a quick search through the help file it looks like the feature is called "The Pattern Maker filter", but it's possible I've found the wrong thing.

I get the impression it is somewhat automatic so it'll probably work well for certain things, like grass textures where you can safely blend parts together, but not for others where you need more structure to the repetition.

Something I miss way back from Deluxe Paint on the Amiga was the tiled painting mode where you'd define a tile size and then everything you did to the image was repeated in each tile. That was great for making repeating backgrounds since you could paint them directly without having to work out how the overlap would look. In Photoshop, unless there's something I don't know about, you'd have to pain the tile once, then offset it by 50% width and height and make the edges match up, then repeat if you messed up the other edges in the process, until done.

[Ampa]

Thank everyone for the input, however many of your suggestions are missing the point!

The background to the request...
I was reading the March installment of the Xara Workbook and came across this tutorial for creating a seamless texture. It looked like a lot of hard work! So I figured that there had to be a nice little too out there to do most of the work for me

The detail of the request...
This is not a request about generating textures from scratch using algorithms.
This request is about converting part of a photograph into a seamless tileable image.

The request is for a freeware tool, since it is a relatively simple task and I feel that there simply must be something out there that does the job.

I am well aware that there a numerous methods of doing this in PhotoShop (or any other painting tool) or via specialist commercial applications or plugins.

Thanks

[roadrunner2525]

Exactly what you want, although donationware rather than true freeware

http://www.imagelys.com/

[Ampa]

Tada! And the prize goes to RoadRunner2525 (along with a small donation of course).

Imagelys is a good find. I have toyed with it briefly this afternoon at it does meet all my criteria.

Could do with some minor improvements though that I shall take up with the author - the most notable being that there is no crop tool! I have to run a second app in parallel to crop my photo before taking it into the tile maker.

Thanks for the input DCers