Using AI To Make A Tileable Texture

You may remember a month or so ago I did a video called "What would concept artists want from an AI tool", and one feature I didn't think about at the time was tileable textures, especially if you're using 3d as part of your concepting process. But since that video's release, AIs like DALL-E and midjourney have added the ability to do this, and I can certainly say making a texture tileable was a boring job that I have no issue seeing automated away. So here's an example of the technique using Dall-e.
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[@AliasA1]

With Stable Diffusion inpainting, you can now also mask out the edges of the texture and check the “tiled” option, and it’ll give you a tiled result. Or use the original untiled texture as a prompt with the same option checked. What a time to be alive.

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Good to know Stable Diffusion can do it too. Thanks!

[@alexanderjeongco]

I like how the AI generates multiple options for a texture. Sometimes what PS comes up with is not what I pictured in my head at all and I end up having to add a few extra steps to get closer to the result I want.

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Totally agree, not all the options are great, but having options lets you pick the best or you can just regenerate to get 4 more.

[@hihosh1]

I have a minor different method which is similar to the old method. I duplicate the layer first. Then offset the original layer. After that I unhide the duplicated layer and use a transparent soft brush to erase away the edges of the duplicated layer this produces really good seamless textures

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Good call, I've used that one before, find the first way faster for most cases but the second way does have advantages in accuracy.

[@computer__eyez]

Thank you for sharing these ideas on how Ai generation can assist us, with nuanced tedious work flows.

[@michipeka9973]

In Photoshop, you can also select the central "cross seam" using the rectangular marquee then use "Content aware fill" on it and most of the times it does an acceptable job.

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Cool, I still use Photoshop CS6 so I wouldn't know about more modern versions of photoshop. Great tip!

[@michipeka9973]

@@ArtOfSoulburn I think the feature was already there in CS6, it's really not that recent. Content aware fill was a game changer for me to quickly extend matte paintings or to do some quick and dirty inpainting for perspective mapping mattes where the multilayering is absent or very badly done.

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

@@michipeka9973 So I checked and it is in cs6. I tried it on my moss example, and got mixed results. The seam disappeared, but then the edges of my selection created a new seam. I then tried feathering my selection and it works well, but of course you get a blurry results around the feathered edge. Of course, the AI also had issues with the moss example, but I can certainly see spots where your technique would be helpful. Thanks for mentioning it!

[@petermgruhn]

The content aware stuff is pretty hot. It is possible to get some "Looks like bad clone repeats" or "everything just turned to mush" results. But the Patch healer, where you select and then drag to an explicit texture source, is excellent for bringing things back.

[@petermgruhn]

@@ArtOfSoulburn The earliest incarnations were "pretty cool." But they beefed up the toolset and improved the algorithms so it's more worthwhile now. I like content aware scale for fun.

[@Pilum1000]

Awesome!

[@Angelamd77]

This is awesome thanks so much!! I've been trying to do textures lately. Can you do a video on how to make skyboxes from photos in Photo shop for VR worlds? Such as equirectangular, 360 etc...?That would be so awesome!

[@petermgruhn]

Remember... maybe a long time ago, there was some early image synthesis software that tried to make tilable textures? Some of them were pretty promising. Then they vanished. Was one of them attached to... Maxon? C4D? But available free? Maybe even called "Image Synth"? Anyway, don't forget kids, there's a big difference between "seamless" and "not obviously repeating." Am I being a luddite when I say "Enh, that obvious vertical band of purple looks pretty bad to me"?

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

I believe that allegorithmic sold one back when they were still working closely with the modo folk, I think that was several years before substance happened. And yes, this example was all about showing the basic technique, I certainly would never use this moss in its current state for an actual texture :)

[@Veda3d]

Would be nice to see compare of this method with Substance Sampler tiling methods.

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Don't have substance anymore, but agreed, would love to see it!

[@apemant]

For Photoshop tiling texture you can use the menu option View -> Pattern Preview. That will tile the texture all over you screen and then you can clone brush away the seams, content aware fill, heal etc. The best part is that you can even paint outside the orignal frame of the picture. And also you see how the tiling looks when actually tiled! Much better that Offset technique I think. But maybe I'm being backwards now. 😁

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Interesting, is that a newer feature? I still use CS 6, so if it's been added in the last 10 years I don't have it and didn't know about it. But thanks for posting, hopefully other users can take advantage of it.

[@apemant]

@@ArtOfSoulburn Yes, I think it's from 2020 or so, not sure though.

[@devnull_]

I've almost never used clone brush, I've used irregular selections combined with content aware fill / sort of poor man's AI seam removal before AI :D and works often quite well if you make the selection shape follow texture contours and transition areas. Also I usually simply draw a "star" shaped mask, instead of "plus" sign. I usually don't want to change those areas that were already OK.

[@devnull_]

Also, this technique works pretty nicely for those wood grain textures too, especially if you add wind or quick smudge to your selection mask shape.

[@user-yk1gq4yh7d]

How should Nomral Map handle it? It is necessary to ensure that the results processed by Normal Map and Albedo are consistent.

[@jixal]

I thought highpass makes a greyscale image? Or at least it does when I use it. How do you get the high pass colour normalisation?

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Here's a tutorial discussing it. Basically you only use the highpass to create a luminosity layer: www.neilblevins.com/art_lessons/brightness_var_tileable_texture/brightness_var_tileable_texture.htm

[@dawidwyborski3753]

I wonder if you can tiling normal map and AO.

[@sentientgun4446]

Have you seen Albert Bozesan's process in photo bashing AI concept art?

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Do you mean this video? kzbin.info/www/bejne/fYCtp6uvipiShqc If so, just checked it out, and yes, I've used a very similar process before using Ai to create photobash elements instead of using photos. It's a cool technique.

[@Akireda_Trip]

Damn ❤️❤️❤️❤️🤌 Thank you for sharing wow

[@ArtOfSoulburn]

Glad you found it helpful!