Creating textures

[mccrab]

I'm trying to get textures I made look good. I took a picture of a wall with planks saved it as .dds and created a normalmap. I used nifscope to apply the texture to an object (in this case Bruma ledge piece). The problem is that the texture is not continous over the whole object. Texture is currently a square next to another square and so on. How can I get the texture look seamless so that the texture covers the whole object? I have tried to change the texture size but it doesn't seem to help.

[Vagrant0]

I'm trying to get textures I made look good. I took a picture of a wall with planks saved it as .dds and created a normalmap. I used nifscope to apply the texture to an object (in this case Bruma ledge piece). The problem is that the texture is not continous over the whole object. Texture is currently a square next to another square and so on. How can I get the texture look seamless so that the texture covers the whole object? I have tried to change the texture size but it doesn't seem to help.

Getting a texture to tile properly isn't something that can easily be done with a photo image due to how even the slightest difference between brightness, woodgrain, or even the angle the camera was at in relation to the surface can make the texture unable to be tiled.

 

For something like this, you either need to have a specific booth setup to take a picture of the material (what texture companies use) or manually adjust the texture using expensive software or by hand, pixel by pixel, if needed.

 

For those who are not able to do things like that, you may need to take a different approach, such as creating a texture from a composite. In cases like this, when you're dealing with boards, separate the image into different layers, one for each board, discarding any partial boards. You then decide on a standard height and width of the texture in board lengths, such as being 2 boards wide by 16 boards tall. Then using you full boards, have it so that the top and bottom of the image end at a seam between boards, and have the boards have seams at the left and right of the image. This should leave you with a very uniform looking image. The problem however is that it's too uniform and will look bad. What you need to do is stagger the rows horizontally so that the board above doesn't have the same vertical seam as the one below. This will result in having your boards get cut off at one side. The portion that gets cut off, you simply move to the other side keeping the same orientation. Finally, touch up any unusual shadows or highlights and add minor variations to the darkness/lightness/thickness of the seams between boards.

 

But yes, no matter what, the process of making an image that can tile is something that requires quite alot of manual effort.