Terragen - for doing tileable textures?

[KirillK]

Is it possible? I mean I am using terragen to render ground and rock textures sometimes.  Just curious is there any trick to make things repetitive , ready  for a tile-able textures?  Some programs like MapZone are able to do so but I have never been able to get a realistic result with them.  Would be nice if Terragen have a trick for doing so.

[TheBlackHole]

Load them in GIMP and run the Make Seamless filter on them.

[Henry Blewer]

It helps to have something to breakup the tiled texture. They always look tiled.

Adding some fractal noise might help. Add a power fractal and connect the image map to the power fractals input. Then adjust the color and displacement of the power fractal to look similar to the image map.

[KirillK]

I meant whether it's possible to create a tileable fractal shader directly which  would repeat in some distance?   Perhaps it might be a trick or something or a kind of math function added to a node network?

[TheBlackHole]

You'd have to position the camera just right to fit the tiling fractal perfectly in the render.

[Goms]

hi,

i thought about this many times, and i still think i'm just missing the small part that will help to create this - but it just won't come to my mind.
you are probably right, some functions should give you what you want, but i don't know how to do this.
the best approach is that you can move and blend everything with some shaders; the moving part is easy, i even got a texture that was tillable, but had therefor edges in between. sooo... i'll post when i got this for sure, but i'll have to wait for this "pling-aaah"-moment.

best regards,
Goms

[old_blaggard]

I've experimented with creating tileable fractal-based textures. I have gotten things to tile through some simple applications of functions, but they always look very systematic. To create tiles, you need to eventually return to the same position, which is very difficult to do with fractals without extensive repetition that foils the whole purpose.

[Oshyan]

Long story short, I don't think TG is an ideal seamless texture creator, but it's probably technically possible. If you really want great seamless textures, something like Genetica is probably a better bet. And hey, it's node-based too!

- Oshyan

[KirillK]

A problem with such soft as Genetica and some others is it's very hard to get something naturally looking with them. it's always come to something artificial.  Think it's because of much more simple rendering and not so advanced fractal shaders.
That would be a great addition to Terragen if it would  have something like "tile in x" and "tile in y" checkboxes.  No only for displacement  but for fake stones and objects distribution also.

I am  still trying to play with math nodes but have no success yet.   

[Goms]

you may be able to get some good results with the transform node.
i tried something a while ago with just moving everything 1000m to x+ while the camera was set to 1000m width in orthographic mode. with some good blending in x and z direction you might get good results; i was not satisfied with this solution and its not perfect.

ill try to upload a sample tomorrow.

[Oshyan]

In general tiling is explicitly avoided *because* it creates repetition. That's one of the big advantages of using fractal/noise functions. So coming up with a method to actually tile fractals seems... a little counterintuitive, at least for Terragen's core purpose of creating realistic landscapes. For tileable texture export of course it makes sense, but that's definitely not a purpose for which TG is designed or for which it will likely be customized.

- Oshyan

[jaf]

This may be a good place to mention a free program to view tiled images.  I found it last night and it's much easier that using an image editor like Photoshop.  It's called Amp Tile viewer and is available here:
   
     http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/TileViewer.php

It is possible to make some good seamless tiles from images.  Of course you have to really edit out parts that will stand out (repeat in each tile) and make the seams as invisible as possible.  I've had good luck with Seamless Texture Generator Pro.

But as Oshyan wrote, fractal functions are the way to go.