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Kraellin
Kraellin
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this just occurred to me when reading steve's 'woodie' thread in the user gallery forum. there are certain patterns that work well in seamless and certain that dont. steve's wood patterns can have a lot of 'knots' in the grain. those knots just would not look right on a regular repeating tile. is it possible to do the tiling on a non-regular repeat? that is, could it place one pattern and then skip that pattern for the next tile and repeat it again later? that would make some of the seamless more desirable to me, at any rate. i've no idea if this is possible and certainly no idea how to do it or how difficult it would be to do, but for some patterns it would certainly work better if it could be done. things like curtains and floor tiles and some others work well when done on a regular repeat, but some things just dont, like steve's wood knots, but it seems a shame to leave them out of the 'seamless' arena.
and just in case the above didnt make sense, imagine having a wood filter that didnt repeat the same pattern in every tile. some tiles would have knots, some would be just grain and so on, such that you'd end up with more of a panel of different tiles that all seamed together but were each or mostly each, different, tile to tile. If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!
Craig |
| Posted: December 18, 2007 1:48 pm |
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StevieJ
Designer/Artist
Posts: 11264
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Ah, excellent suggestion!!! This would be perfect for all kinds of texture filters to make tiling look randomly continuous..... Steve
"Buzzards gotta eat...same as worms..." - Clint :) |
| Posted: December 18, 2007 3:44 pm |
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jffe
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Uhh, ya just build that into the filter, then reduce the Size,pixels setting ?
jffe Filter Forger |
| Posted: December 18, 2007 4:22 pm |
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StevieJ
Designer/Artist
Posts: 11264
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jffe wrote:
ya just build that into the filter, then reduce the Size,pixels setting |
How do you do that without effecting all the components tied to the size control??? Steve
"Buzzards gotta eat...same as worms..." - Clint :)
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| Posted: December 18, 2007 7:05 pm |
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Sphinx.
Filter Optimizer
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Hmm.. seems like a quite complex request; But what you talk about is a weakness seen in many seamless tile textures.. often in form as a rather diffuse gradient that biases the texture towards a corner or side in intensity - something you only see when the texture is set side by side..
To my knowledge you can't really solve this in a generic manner, because the artifacts are related to the specific nature.
However.. as you design the filter, you can make the knots/shades/etc less probable by masking with e.g. a perlin noise - it should react as expected with the Size/Pixels controller. Alternately to disregard the size slider fully, you could add checkboxes for those less frequent features, so the user can decide if there should be a knot or not 
With such a solution the knot should ofcourse be "added" to the texture in a way that leaves the edges for the given variation equal to the same variation without the knot. This way the knot version can be combined in seamless context with the ones without.
As I see it, its really a design problem rather than a limitation.. but I could be misunderstanding the issue? |
| Posted: December 18, 2007 8:25 pm |
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jffe
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StevieJ wrote:
How do you do that without effecting all the components tied to the size control??? |
----A lot of planning, and some range limiting of controls helps sometimes.
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Sphinx. wrote:
As I see it, its really a design problem rather than a limitation.. |
----Yep.
----It's not an easy thing to do, I've actually taken about 3-4 months working on various techniques, and that is one of them (the resizing within the filter using Size,pixels). Leaving out things like frames and profgrads, and thinking about sizing ranges isn't a "fun" way to sit down and make a filter, but you do learn a lot along the way if only slowly.
jffe Filter Forger
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| Posted: December 18, 2007 9:17 pm |
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Mousewrites
Not life size.
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Ok, so, I've been doing 3d animation for 10 years, and teaching PS for almost that long. I work for Adobe now (this is me qualifying my long winded answer. )
What you're talking about is a procedural texture (one that has parameters, and repeats in different ways to prevent visual tiling.) This is a great thing, and is built into many 3d programs. But it's not what FF does.
FF builds bitmap textures. This is a bitmap texture (using the awesome 'nodes' filter by Uberzev):
Texture 1
When applied to a plane in a 3d program, it looks like this:
Example 1
When we make it smaller (make it 'tile' on the plane), it looks like this:
Example 2
Clearly is tiling. It gets even worse when we tile it more:
Example 3
So, that sucks.
Here I've dropped the tile size in FF, so that the texture appears smaller. Note that there is no repeating design here:
Texture 2
When applied to the same plane with the same mapping as example 1, the pipes are smaller, but not repeat appears:
Example 4
Awesome! Clearly, this is a way to get rid of the tile! But it does reduce the resolution of each 'pipe', which means up close you can see the difference between the two. Example 3 will look sharper than Example 4 at the same distance, because it's devoting more pixels to each relative inch.
But! If we reduce the size, you can STILL see the tile. Sadface:
Example 5
To get rid of that tiling, we'd have to turn the size down yet again in FF (which, again, drops the resolution, causing us to have to render a very large pic if we want the same resolution), or use a texture that is 'procedural', and will not tile, ever, in 3d.
Most (if not all) game engines do not have support for rendering in-game procedural textures. Most 3d programs do as a matter of course.
The problem is, of course, that you wouldn't be putting out a bitmap from FF, you'd be outputting code for the 3d program to read.
So, to sum up (if anyone is still reading this): what you want is TOTALLY COOL, and would work well, IF FF suddenly started outputting each filter as code that a 3d program could read. Which would mean they would have to have many different code options, because 3dsmax, maya, lightwave, and all the rest don't read the same kind of texture/surface code, and treat things differently.
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| Posted: December 19, 2007 2:48 pm |
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Kraellin
Kraellin
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hmmm, didnt expect this much feedback. and since i'm not all that technically inclined on 3d and seamless, i'll just say this. when you render for seamless, you may have noticed that FF renders your image differently, in most cases, than what your current image/render/output looks like without seamless turned on. that being said, there is obviously some routine FF uses to make a render seamless.... some formula. surely, that cant be just limited to just one, fixed forumla with no possible other variations. and, if that is the case, then why not simply use more than one formula to render out more than one variation and then use one for one tile and another for another tile giving a variety to your seamless? so, in the case of steve's 'woodie', one tile would render out with a knot and one with just the grain?
or, am i missing something here? i'm assuming, i suppose, that each given variation still comes up such that it would seamlessly tile with the other variations and perhaps that's the problem?
and, i dont want to re-size the thing to achieve this. that seems a bad way of going. like mouse said, you tend to lose resolution and besides, most applications, including game engines can re-size a texture/tile anyways. so no need for redundancy there.
all i want is that the various seamless tiles render out differently from each other but still tie into together seamlessly. yeah, all i want  sounds so simple, but i do realize at least some of the problems with this. any given tile would have to match up with a different seamless tile on four sides. and, i'm guessing that could be quite a trick with more than one rendition of a seamless tile.
but, if it could be done, steve's 'woodie' would take on a whole new expanded use. one could make varied wood walls all from one output from FF. i've done a few 3d models and am quite dissatisfied with a 'stone wall' that is essentially just one tile being repeated endlessly. it just looks amateurish, like someone rubber-stamped the thing in place. i would think, FF being a texture machine in its main thrust, would have something that could output something better.
now, i may also be overlooking the author's input on all this. if one knew that he was going to make a wood panel or stone wall, i suppose that author could try and plan for close variations in his presets and render out a number of these seamlessly and get pretty close. and i also know that there is software for blending edges in similar looking images/textures. still, it just seems a natural progression for something like FF to be able to do this. yeah, easily said, but no idea how possible or feasible or difficult the actuality might be to do. so, i just leave it as a suggestion and a question for the developers; can it be done and would it be worth doing? If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!
Craig |
| Posted: December 19, 2007 3:10 pm |
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Mousewrites
Not life size.
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I think the main problem is here what you expect to be getting out of FF. One big texture with several different tiles included? three or four textures that match up on the edges (thereby allowing you to have several different versions?).
If it's the first one, how does this hit you:
Say you want a wood texture that's essentially 4 tiles of 'woodie' from Stevie. The texture size you've chosen is 600 px square (just a number).
Make a new file that's 1200 px square (would fit 4 600 px tiles), and then reduce the tile size in FF to 600 px. This SHOULD make it render 4 600 px tiles at the same resolution as the first 600 px tile, but it will be four different tiles that all match up seamlessly.
Does that make sense? Yes, you're using the 'size' slider, but you're compensating for that by making the image bigger.
If it's the second, it MIGHT be possible, but I'm not sure how you could use them. In a 3d app, it'd be a PITA to line them up in a texture... If it's not for 3d, just 2d, I can see some use to it, but it would still be a mess to put together IMHO.
[Edit to add] Ok, I can see if you're putting the files together in PS it'd be easy to line them up, but then you'd still just be making one big texture, and why not let FF do that in the first place?
If it's not either of those two things... I'm having trouble conceptualizing what you want the output to be. I might be missing something here, though.
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| Posted: December 19, 2007 3:22 pm |
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jffe
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Mouse has the only answer that works with FF currently, same as I said, you build the variation into the filter, the only caveat being, you have to render very large sizes to retain more detail because of lowering the Pixel,size setting in FF. And I suppose at some point even that isn't going to work for some people/apps. And good demonstration examples Mouse, and explanation btw.
jffe Filter Forger |
| Posted: December 19, 2007 3:28 pm |
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Kraellin
Kraellin
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| I think the main problem is here what you expect to be getting out of FF. One big texture with several different tiles included? |
yes, this. using steve's wood again, you see one tile without seamless turned on. let's call that one piece of a plank of wood or better, one portion of an entire wood paneled wall. a wood paneled wall would have a lot of different grain patterns and perhaps some knots and certainly a lot of variety. it would be, in the real world, more or less seamless (more or less ). so, let's say steve's filter can produce all that variety but, it wont put it together seamlessly. all i was thinking of was being able to have FF do that for you when you turned on seamless (as an option, not the default option).
so, FF might be able to take several presets and put them all together as one seamless render with all the variations of those presets, or, because FF does re-render a given image when you turn on seamless to make it seamless, you could just have FF spit out or calculate how everything could or would line up to make a nice, seamless look.
and yes, i could see that if you wanted a complete panel, then make a panel filter of wood rather than just making one section of it. that would certainly be possible for the author to do. simply change your default image size to a larger size and change your filter for making it a larger scaled effect. and that, i would think, would be quite possible for an author to do. but, i dont see many filters that actually have done this. If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!
Craig
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| Posted: December 19, 2007 3:40 pm |
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SpaceRay
SpaceRay
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very good and interesting
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| Posted: November 17, 2011 2:27 am |
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SpaceRay
SpaceRay
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| Posted: August 18, 2012 3:48 am |
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