Any tips on making a good tillable stone? I have purchased some of the best stone materials, but they all tile real bad. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You don’t really need to buy any plugins to create tiling textures. All you need to do is to use the offset filter in Photoshop and “clone tool” out the seams. It’s quite easy.
What I usually do if I find things are tiling too much is I render the uvw and tile it manually over my template then I clone out the seams.
Stones
I’ll have to play around. I think I tried everything. It would be nice to have a stone generator like the brick generators you can find on-line. I am nor working with round stone, which seem to be the toughest.
If seams are the problem, check out:
Seamless Texture generator Pro:
http://www.m3corp.com/a/products/stg.htm
I learned about seamless Texture Generator Pro from this forum. It’s a brilliant little tool. I don’t know how I ever got by without it.
The real beauty part is that it blends the values and colors of the image from edge to edge so that you can make a good, tiling texture from difficult or imperfect source images. I usually do a final clean up pass with Photoshop’s Spot Healing Tool.
Seamless
I bought that the day the link was posted, but I really didn’t get the purpose. It doesn’t help with tiling, just the color variance in an image.
What’s the image your trying to tile? (Watermark it if you don’t want to distibute the copyright material.) It sounds like you’re trying to make a seamless texture but then later it sounds like your looking for a bonded stone (i.e. mortar joints) tile.
Seamless
We use a lot of this stone and a lot of large surfaces. Tiles badly.
Yeah that’s a tough one (looks like it’s from the stoneCAD CD most of which are nice textures but way too small for anything useful). Basically there’s not enough boulders in it to disguise any tiling so you’re best bet is to manually tile it 3-4 times in photoshop and then start painting/cloning/erasing to remove some of the offending stones and create a larger texture. It actually doesn’t take too long one you get the hang of it. WHat you’ll end up with is a new textxture that repeats partially in itself (the 3-4 times) but since this repetition is broken up by what you change, visually it all starts to meld together a little more. You can actually acheive alot by just setting a few adjustment layers and painting the tonal and hue adjustments onto random stones.
Stone
That is what I usually do, but I was hoping someone had a better way. A stone generator like the brick generators would be great.
The stone comes from:
If you have some free time you could try to make a large map using geometry and material by element. May be worth it in the long run then just render it out to a material.
Thanks for the link - some ok textures there. Regarding your stone, a quick tweak in photoshop (About 10 min.) got this…
Before is on the left, after on the right (all the same stones just different colors/values)
stone
much better .. I’ll work on it.