What we’re aiming to achieve:
A texture that can be tiled when put onto any 3D object. This is usually used in games, to save system resources and to look good.
What’s needed:
- Photoshop (version 6 or above)
- This texture from iBO Freebies section
- Basic understanding of Photoshop work flow
What are seams?
Take a look at this example below:
Notice the left 3D ball is textured with a seam streak down the middle, while the right one does not. What we want to do is edit our texture so that no faulty edges are present when placed onto a 3D object. Surprisingly, the same concept applies to CSS style backgrounds for web design as well, but that will be another tutorial.
Instructions
1. Open this texture in photoshop, you can use other textures of your choice, take a look in iBO Freebies section. We will be using the crop and stamp tool for now, let’s get started:
2. Select the crop tool, now hold ALT, make a square selection like below, hit Enter:
3. Once done, you will have something like below, a perfect square shape of the texture, right mouse click and select “duplicate layer”:
4. Change the duplicated layer style to “Overlay” like below to flesh out the details:
5. Now select the original “concrete” layer and its duplicates, hit Ctrl + E to merge them:
6. Once merged, go to: filter>other>offset:
7. You will now notice seams clearly visible as we tweak the 2 bars, click “OK” once seams are around the middle of the image:
8. Due to the nature of the texture, the seams are not as visible which is a good thing, select the “clone stamp tool shown in step 1″, set stamp brush as soft, with a 55% opacity, remember this can differ depending on the texture. Hit left mouse + hold ALt key to sample a clean area with no seams, let go of ALT and brush over seams:
9. After seams patched we get something like this:
10. filter>other>offset again to check if there are other seams you’ve missed, sometimes simple things like these can easily be overlooked in games and renderings:
11. This step and step 12 are optional, depending on where you are applying the texture depending on personal preference:
12. FINAL image:
FINAL image applied to a 3D model without any seams:
