The Key to Creating Good, Tileable Images (in GIMP)

I’m writing this as a general guide both for future reference, and to get feedback from others.

Often when using an image manipulation program such as GIMP or Photoshop, you’ll need to create large swaths of consistent texture. The easiest way to do this is with a pattern fill tool, however most programs only include a small set of patterns. The good news is that you can make your own with relatively little grief.

A quick note- While you may occasionally want an obvious tile (e.g. tiled floors), this discussion will focus on tiles that try to appear seamless.

Choose a Texture

Crop Inconsistencies

Remove Anomalies

Offset and Wrap

Using the four quadrants as a baseline, you can use the rubber stamp and healing tools to cover the seams- with any luck this process will be fairly simple and painless. Remember, the goal is to make the seams disappear, so be sure to feather it in unevenly, and not with a straight line that will still be visible.

The phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees” applies here. We’ve seen what one intersection looks like- how about several? If we increase the image canvas size and duplicate time layer 3 more times, we can set them side-by-side and merge them down to identify redundant features that escaped us previously. Things you might see include:

• That small twig may have been unnoticeable with one tile, but with many tiles it betrays the redundancy
• There may have been an ever-so slight variation in color that was previously unnoticed
• The area surrounding the original seams was not as well blended as previously thought
• A small area that is simply too unique and sticks out just enough to be noticeable.

You have a choice at this point; you can either undo back to the single image, or choose to keep it quadrupled. If you keep it quadrupled, you can ad ever-so-slight modifications to each quadrant to help disperse the redundancy.

Exporting

The final step is to export (File->export as… or ctrl+shift+e) and save the pattern as a .pat file. This should be kept in your GIMP patterns folder (on linux ~/.gimp-2.8/patterns/)

The next time you refresh your patterns box, you should see your new texture.

Holy Cow it’s too Big!

Oh, all that work we just put in? It may be worthless; I shoulda mentioned that up front.

Here’s the problem: If your base texture is 2500×2000 pixels, don’t be surprised that your pattern is gigantic when you try to use it. As of right now, GIMP doesn’t have a built-in way to scale patterns (although there are plugins that claim to do it). Your best bet is to scale the image down before exporting it to a pat file, just be warned that the scaled image may have seams reappear from the scaling interpolation, so you may need to run through the offsets again to verify that it’s acceptable.

Final Note…

• No, I cannot tell you how to do this in photoshop.
• I despise capitalizing GIMP. it I understand why it’s supposed to be, but it still feels super lame.
• If you have feedback, please leave a comment below- I’d love to improve my process.
• If you liked this tutorial, please consider supporting me via Patreon