Seamless texture tiling of multiple layers?
polycounter lvl 6
Hello!
I've been trying to create a seamless texture of a wall in photoshop with no luck.
Now i know what you're going to say, "just look up a tutorial!".
Well, that doesn't really work in my case (as far as i can tell), since I'm trying to work on 4 textures at once; normal, diffuse, occlusion, heightmap.
I got these maps NOT from a tiled, z-brush sculpted mesh aimed at being seamless from the start; i got them from scanning a real object. I figured it'd be a good way to get true depth.
I'm saying true depth because there are two other options that achieve what I'm trying to do;
1. You could photograph the texture and then go over it with crazybump; this will not produce high quality, realistic results because crazybump doesn't have the magical ability to recognize depth from a 2d image, it's just looking at lightness changes, which may as well be just result from the discoloration of your object.
2. You could just say "screw it" and just do what i previously mentioned and sculpt a wall with tiling enabled instead of scanning the real stuff. I'm not a fan of this option it'd be really time consuming to produce this much organic detail with sculpting. Even if you can do it you're going to spend a hell of a lot more time doing it as opposed to scanning a wall that's readily available.
Now on to the problem: making this texture seamless is proving impossible since Photoshop doesn't seem to play nice with grouped textures. If you want the same exact effect applied to a group of layers you need to convert the whole deal into a smart object, but doing so stops you from un-packing your smart object after applying the effect. You can sort of do it though, by going into your smart object.
You do this by double clicking your smart object layer, which then opens up a new, temporary file with all of your layers exposed. The effects from your main file aren't applied to these layers, so you're pretty much where you started at this point.
You can turn a layer off though, and this will also turn off the layer in your main project, meaning that you can turn all of your layers off one-by-one, and then you can save them individually in order to have the effect applied in the same way to all of the layers.
This is all very tedious but here is the problem; even if you do all this you still can't use clone stamp on your group of smart objects, because apparently you just can't clone stamp any type of smart object. You may be able to puppet warp it, or use other filters, but you can't do the same with clone stamp.
Using the clone stamp is absolutely necessary, since it's your bread and butter when it comes to making textures seamless, and you would have to do the exact same clone stamp operation to all of your layers at the same time.
Am i being crazy here but is there just no solution to this? (at least in photoshop)
I've made a similar thread before, but no one even bothered to respond. This problem is a bit less general, and I'm really hoping the community has a solution.
Here are the textures I'm using in case you want to give it a try:
diffuse, occlusion, normalmap
heightmap
Thanks for reading!
I've been trying to create a seamless texture of a wall in photoshop with no luck.
Now i know what you're going to say, "just look up a tutorial!".
Well, that doesn't really work in my case (as far as i can tell), since I'm trying to work on 4 textures at once; normal, diffuse, occlusion, heightmap.
I got these maps NOT from a tiled, z-brush sculpted mesh aimed at being seamless from the start; i got them from scanning a real object. I figured it'd be a good way to get true depth.
I'm saying true depth because there are two other options that achieve what I'm trying to do;
1. You could photograph the texture and then go over it with crazybump; this will not produce high quality, realistic results because crazybump doesn't have the magical ability to recognize depth from a 2d image, it's just looking at lightness changes, which may as well be just result from the discoloration of your object.
2. You could just say "screw it" and just do what i previously mentioned and sculpt a wall with tiling enabled instead of scanning the real stuff. I'm not a fan of this option it'd be really time consuming to produce this much organic detail with sculpting. Even if you can do it you're going to spend a hell of a lot more time doing it as opposed to scanning a wall that's readily available.
Now on to the problem: making this texture seamless is proving impossible since Photoshop doesn't seem to play nice with grouped textures. If you want the same exact effect applied to a group of layers you need to convert the whole deal into a smart object, but doing so stops you from un-packing your smart object after applying the effect. You can sort of do it though, by going into your smart object.
You do this by double clicking your smart object layer, which then opens up a new, temporary file with all of your layers exposed. The effects from your main file aren't applied to these layers, so you're pretty much where you started at this point.
You can turn a layer off though, and this will also turn off the layer in your main project, meaning that you can turn all of your layers off one-by-one, and then you can save them individually in order to have the effect applied in the same way to all of the layers.
This is all very tedious but here is the problem; even if you do all this you still can't use clone stamp on your group of smart objects, because apparently you just can't clone stamp any type of smart object. You may be able to puppet warp it, or use other filters, but you can't do the same with clone stamp.
Using the clone stamp is absolutely necessary, since it's your bread and butter when it comes to making textures seamless, and you would have to do the exact same clone stamp operation to all of your layers at the same time.
Am i being crazy here but is there just no solution to this? (at least in photoshop)
I've made a similar thread before, but no one even bothered to respond. This problem is a bit less general, and I'm really hoping the community has a solution.
Here are the textures I'm using in case you want to give it a try:
diffuse, occlusion, normalmap
heightmap
Thanks for reading!
Replies
What I found useful is recomposing the image fragments + removing too prominent things but see no convenient soft for this too. Still believe scanning gives much more natural looking textures than any procedural approach . But tools for that is really poor currently. Neighther 3d coat, nor Painter allow to recompose / move /scale fragments easily .
ps. Since the scanning gives you no roughness channel, just color and depth . And you have to clean /touch the depth in Z brush nevertheless I'd suggest to clone over seams in zbrush 2,5d layers too . Although it's also tremendously inconvenient .
In Photoshop it records the actions, but does nothing in playback (clone tool recording is a known broken feature), and Krita has some aliasing issues and generates some square artefacts. Very disappointing.
EDIT: I should note that I used PS CS6. Maybe CC is different.
With that said.
Removing seams from scans will always be an approximation rather than perfection. I haven't worked with 3D scans yet, so I am not an expert on this, but it still is similar to working with poorly captured real life textures. Looking up how to tile a texture from photo reference should yield a ton of useful tricks that will work with this.
I sent an email to the Quixel people, I'm sure they've had the same problem, let's just hope that they're willing to share their thoughts on it.
I've processed 3d scans with pretty good results before.
1 2 3
Since diffuse and normals are the only things you're working on when you make a non-planar model it's kind of easy to clean up in both photoshop and a 3d app with 3d clonestamp.
I have not added a roughness map manually since they were all of matte stones, but it should be kind of trivial. Roughness is a bit more arbitrary so adding that afterwards is no problem, but you really want your normal map to match your occlusion, height and to some extent your diffuse, which is why you absolutely have to do the same actions on each layer simultaneously.
The 3D models aren't meant to be seamless so clonestamping those is just fine, but if you do the same to a seamless wall texture the results won't be too good.
I'm not sure how the entire process would work if i had my high resolution mesh and put it into zbrush, since when people make sculpts seamless they do it that way from the beginning, not as an afterthought. And I'm not even sure why i should even want to do that; baking a flat wall onto a plane is as efficient as you're going to get, you should never have to go into zbrush since you are left with a quad and a bunch of textures. If you had the tools to work those textures then making it seamless would be pretty trivial.
What a bummer. Good thinking though.
At least now i don't have to try it myself just to be disappointed.