How to make a Seamless Tiling Texture in Photoshop

[austin_jephson]

I just wanted to post this as a follow up the Eric Chappell's tips on using Multi-Scale Textures in InfraWorks 360.

One very important component in getting your multi-scale textures to look good is that you have a seamlessly tiling texture, where the edges blend into each other perfectly.  Here is a trick that I use to create them.  It requires Photoshop, but many other image editing applications have the same functionality.

A few additional pointers:

• Start with a good texture.  No matter how seamless it is, if it has high contrast inside it, that contrast will make the tiling more visible as you zoom out.  For something like this concrete texture, I actually used the Spot Healing Brush to blend out some of the high contrast areas, evening out the entire image.
• There is a bit of finesse involved in creating really nice textures, so it might require some trial and error.  Save it out as a PNG or JPEG and add it to Infraworks so that you can see it in 3d, then you can always go back and fine tune it.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the forums!