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40oz

Creating Vines/Wires/Tech without seams

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I'm guessing with the lack of choices in types of vines and techy textures with wires and junk, some of you guys don't know an easy way to do this. I didn't even know for a pretty long time, but I found out a really simplified way to do it.

Start with your blank white canvas, and create a type of grid pattern. Unless you want your texture to look very uniform (for vines or messy wires, i don't know why you would want do this) keep your parallel lines at varying distances



Next, white out everything in the middle, leave only the pixels that are directly connected to outside borders of the image.



Now draw squigly lines to connect any two of the dots. It doesn't matter which dots connect as long as you don't have more than one line connecting to the same border dot.



Give these wires some depth so they don't look too flat.



Now I'll put 4 together so you can see



And as you can see, these wires tile without seams. Well I may need to make some minor adjustments to make em perfect but it's good for the most part. If I make 5 or 6 images using this same method, and stack em on top of each other, I should have a full tangly wirey mess of a texture :D

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Yeah. I draw the wires really dark at first with a large brush, then switch to a smaller brush, brighter color, and go over the lines again.

Also if you want to create a texture much like TEKWALL4, make a lot more vertical lines than horizontal, and instead of squigly lines, make them only change direction at 45 degree angles.

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For seamless tiling, I just offset the image a bunch (to put the edges in the center) first horizontally, then vertically, then both, and either work on the relevant parts of it as I go, or modify and clean up the edges of what I've already created.

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esselfortium said:

For seamless tiling, I just offset the image a bunch (to put the edges in the center)

GIMP has a feature to make that faster, by the way. Shift+Ctrl+O gives the offset menu, with a very convenient X+half/Y+half button. Click it once, match the borders, then click it again to restore the original offsets.

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Alternatively you could just use a paint package that wraps your brush strokes around the canvas.

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Seriously dude, spend the whole 1 minute it takes to get GIMP or Paint.net

Otherwise, cool tutorial.

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I do have paint.net but the interface is way different than what I'm used to, I still use it for what I have to use it for but MS Paint is still my image editor of choice. I'm probably gonna use it to work on this finished product.

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Gez said:

GIMP has a feature to make that faster, by the way. Shift+Ctrl+O gives the offset menu, with a very convenient X+half/Y+half button. Click it once, match the borders, then click it again to restore the original offsets.

Yeah, I use Photoshop's similar "Offset" filter. Sometimes combined with the magic of Smart Layers.

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Copy/paste/flip-horizontal and soft erase all but the edge, clean up the rest. Do the same vertically. It's worked so far.

Nice looking wire texture though, very clean, especially considering that you're using ms-paint.

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I should also mention that I use Irfanview a lot too (which is a handy photo editing tool) for converting images to different formats. I also use it for it's handy blur, explosion, and noise effects. Also for recolors as well.

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I would have never thought of doing that. I usually take the longer approach and end up trial-and-error-ing my way through it.

Nice work, though!

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DaniJ said:

Alternatively you could just use a paint package that wraps your brush strokes around the canvas.

Really? like what? :D

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Hijacking the thread for a quick question of my own: anyone know of a free(ware) paint program that allows you to distort pictures? I'm specifically looking for something that can transform a square into a circle.

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Mordeth said:

Hijacking the thread for a quick question of my own: anyone know of a free(ware) paint program that allows you to distort pictures? I'm specifically looking for something that can transform a square into a circle.






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Well I assumed that Mordeth meant a program to distort a square into a circle rather than cutting a cirle out of a square so 40oz missed the point too :P

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Mordeth said:

Hijacking the thread for a quick question of my own: anyone know of a free(ware) paint program that allows you to distort pictures? I'm specifically looking for something that can transform a square into a circle.

You could try this:
http://www.pixlr.com/editor/
But for that it's really Photoshop CS that is king.

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Yes, I meant distorting a square into a circle, not cutting out a shape. Thanks for the two links! But, can't seem to find this "spherical and cylindrical mapping" option you mentioned?

[EDIT] After a search I found it described as being present in its filter features, but I can't actually find it in the paint plugin itself..? Also, I'm not actually looking to wrap this texture so it looks like a ball... just a simple distortion from a 2D square texture to a 2D circle texture.

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Brilliant idea this, just tried it out earlier and it makes creating a tangle of wires or greenery so much easier. The demonstartion that 40oz showed was an extreme version of what is capable but it works well for less wires also.

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