editing textrures and flats to mirror properly

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a program that would allow me to edit say a floor texture for example and the program shows a mirror of what i'm working on. Basically like side by side so i can see real time if my textures will match up seamlessly, i've tried multiple searches for such software and zero luck, any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for you responses!

As an update i'm currently working on level 14 of my tc wad, it's coming along nicely, i'll be posting more as it happens.

PaintedBlack said:

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a program that would allow me to edit say a floor texture for example and the program shows a mirror of what i'm working on. Basically like side by side so i can see real time if my textures will match up seamlessly

That would help. An image will always be seamless with its mirrors... What you want is to have the texture tiling.

Here's what you can do: in the GIMP, hit Ctrl-Shift-O. It'll bring up the "Offset" window. Click on "X/2, Y/2" and OK to move the image to its half width, half height offset position. Now the seams are in the middle of the picture rather than the size, so you can concentrate on making it seamless. Once you're done, hit Ctrl-Shift-O again and move again by half width and half height. It'll put the image back to its original position and you can check that you didn't damage the seamlessness in the original middle.

Well I've learned something today.

Thanks Gez.

Wish I had read this a couple of hours ago. I just came off making a bunch of flats, and I was checking the tiling manually (ie making a new 128 by 128 inage and then cutting and pasting the flat 4 times so each border was meeting its opposite.)

You could always try Jasc Paint Shop Pro it has a seamless tiling feature built in that can usually do a pretty good job.

Pottus said:

You could always try Jasc Paint Shop Pro it has a seamless tiling feature built in that can usually do a pretty good job.

Which version? I have PSP7 and I've never seen that option myself.

Not saying it doesn't exist, just that I haven't found it. :P

I've had to work with PSP 9 before, and I know that it has a "seamless tiling" feature, but I'm not sure about earlier versions. I remember it being kind of crappy for anything more complex than cloud patterns though; I could always get better results by offsetting the image and editing it to tile manually.

I do seem to recall a fairly configurable dialog window for the feature, though, so it's probably more useful than I give it credit for.

Ya it depends how you use it, for instance if your trying to do a brick texture you probably can't expect very good results, if it's a texture like ashwall then it does a pretty good job.

Xaser said:

Which version? I have PSP7 and I've never seen that option myself.

That's not surprising, as Effects -> Image Effects -> Seamless Tiling made it's first appearance in PSP8.

PSPX3U is doing a pretty good job of tiling when one uses it in combination with the perspective controls, straighten and perspective correction.

Well, I have a photoshop tutorial I created for the Ascension team for creating seamless textures... But it would pretty much work with any "paint" program. It works great with any kind of texture. I'll just copy the tutorial from the Ascension Forums and paste it here.

By the way, I hadn't realized it when I made it but I never completely made the texture vertically tillable. *shrugs* Oh well. You can just use the process for tilling horizontally to make it tile vertically.


------------------Photoshop Seamless Texture Tiling tutorial from the Ascension Doom Forums------------------

Creating textures that have no seams when tiled is an important skill when creating textures for Doom. If you just take a photo of a brick wall and then tile that image you will see a seam where it is easy to tell where the one image stops and the other begins. It is quite simple to create a texture that is seamless when tiled. In fact it took me under 10 minutes to create the images for this tutorial and the only reason it didn't take under 5 minutes is because I was saving the images for the tutorial while making sure I captured anything important. This tutorial will show us two slightly different methods of making seamless textures while ending up with identical results. We will tile the texture vertically one way while tiling the texture horizontally another way. Both methods are equally effective.

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1.)
Lets get started. To begin I ripped the brick wall image bellow from wikipdea. Its dimensions are 512x384. It is a good start because 512 is a power of 2 which is what the Doom engine (and nearly every other video game out there) uses.


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2.)
Now we just need to get its height up to 512 as well. The easiest way to do this without warping the pixels is to change its canvas size (Image/Canvas Size). Now change the height pixels from 384 to 512. Now go down to Anchor and click on the arrow that is pointing strait up on the top center of the box. Now click "OK" and the image will expand leaving a blank space that is filled with your background color (Default Black).

(Tip: Never stretch an image. The pixels will be blurred in order to compensate and the results are never satisfying.)

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3.)
To fill in that blank space we are going to select the top portion of the brick wall with the "Rectangular Marquee Tool". The image shown bellow shows how much I have selected.


Now copy and paste the selection and then move it down to cover the empty space at the bottom. I but the pasted layer up against the bottom (easy if "Snap" is on) of the canvas because this way our texture will already be vertically tile-able. From here I used the "Eraser Tool" with a soft brush & "Flow" set to 10% to lightly erase the areas around the seam until it becomes seamless. The image bellow is what we have so far.


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4.)
Now that we have a texture that is vertically til-able we can move on to tiling it horizontally. Use the "Offset" filter (Filter/Other/Offset). Once the window pops up just change the "Horizontal" offset to "256". Make sure the preview box is checked so you can see what the effect will be and make sure that the "Wrap Around" box is checked. Now the seam is in the center of the image and is very easy to see. The image bellow shows what this will look like.


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5.)
From here we will repeat the method we used before and select a portion of the texture of one of the edges.


Copy the selection, paste it over the seam and then softly erase the edges of the pasted layer. The image bellow is the end result which can be tiled both vertically and horizontally. This method will work with anything but some images will require more touch-ups than I have provided.

As stated above, I hadn't realized it when I made it but I never completely made the texture vertically tillable. *shrugs* Oh well. You can just use the process for tilling horizontally to make it tile vertically.

To complete step 3 I just copied the bottom two rows of bricks and then pasted them over the seam and then softly erased the edges of the pasted layer. This is the completely tillable texture