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Seamless plain

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jim:
i right now have to create a cupple of seamless tree-crust textures and would really love to sculpt them to bake proper maps.

i remembered working with a 2D image program a whyle back called "Texture Maker" which has a seamles function.
You have your image boundaries and if you move your stroke outside on one side the program continues the sroke on the opposite side of the image.
That way the image always remains tileable.

Heres a video that demonstrates the funktion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKegHws4Ds8

i thought now that you implement all that UV awesomeness its maybe possible to do something like this in 3D?
Basically it would be a square-plain on which you can sculpt a hightmap and MM would have to make sure that the edges fit.


The Tree-crust made its usefullness most aparent to me but it could work just as well for many other maps like ocean waves, brick/nature stone walls, dunes, rock or ornaments and so on.
If the masked brushes would work well with it too it should give some nice results for industrial pattern as well like punshing sheets, beams and welded or bolted metal plates ect.
http://up.picr.de/2269596.jpg

With MMs dynamic meshing refinement one would be completely independent of resolution and bake the textures (Normal/Displacement/AO/ect.) later in another application in whatever resolution desired.

RMS:
Curious about what you are trying to do here...if I understand correctly, you don't actually want to make tileable geometry, you just want to use it to bake textures/maps? is that right? Or do you export the geometry and tile it around a 3D tree or something like that?

Anyway this is maybe not super-helpful but you should be able to create a tileable geometry patch using the mirror tool. Although I guess you wouldn't get tangent continuity at the boundary...not such a good solution...

jim:
Well yes, i mostly thought of it for createing good texture maps (normalmaps), in this tree case it would be more than enough and they are just way easier to handle and cheaper to render.
Still it would be pretty cool to have the tiles as geometry at first to be more flexible all around and to then bring the baked textures onto the trunk using UV-maps.

Yet, in some cases you may decide to just go with the geometry, i could see this work well for cobblestone pavement for example.


In that case you could work with instanceing, which Lightwave implemented recently and really renders super fast.

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/features-lightwave-menu.html

i would guess having 10000 instances of one geometry tile for your floor would render WAY faster than using a displacement map, and render just as fast as using a normal map of that same tile, but would give a better result then any of these methods.

But also, i dont know ... i guess in my mind i always see this wicked "GeoBrush" coming into MM one of these days and kinda had that in mind too when i thought abut it.
Lets say you sculpt a fish in MM, then pop open the "Tile-Creator" ( :) ) feature, you make a fishflake-tile from like nine scales in there and then GeoBrush-paint that tile all over your fish model.

You know, in this case without marking a source "canvas" area but rather a point on your tile from where to start sampling like a pick with Photoshop's stamp tool.
If you hit a edge of your tile during your stroke it would just restart sampling on the opposite side of the tile.
With that you could cover a unlimited area with one continuous stroke sampled from just one fairly simple geometry tile.

And since these tiles already got a geometry resolution you would avoide the masked-brush problen where you have to pre-divide areas to get clean results of complex shapes.
One could make oneself a library of tiles for all sorts of situations ... share them with the MM community ... the sun would shine ... children dance in fire-hydrant fountains ... happy faces all around!
... but i digress.  ;D

But youre right of course, i guess for now i could sculpt a tree-rind pattern, mirror it up and to the side and then re-sculpt the seams making sure i dont touch the edges again.
Thans basicly what i do right now in PS when i create tileable image maps, and i aslo used a similar method in Lightwave yesterday to create that simple stone-wall tile sample i posted above.
Its not impossible but always difficult and messy right now, and since this is really something i need all the time i just wish it could be made easyer.

Just to top it all off with a personal note, we in Lightwave got a plugin called "Quadpanels" which is using a user defined set of "Nurnies" (basically tileable geometry squares) and does a random array of these based on a bunch of settings inside a given area.

http://www.liberty3d.com/store/liberty3d-tools/quadpanels/

Its ment for industrial patterns, for example populating the outer hull of a spaceship but i cant see why it would not work with organic shapes too.

RMS:
i have read about nurnies/greebles before but never considered the meshmixer applications...anyway yea I get what you are saying. Interesting. Possible.

jim:
Sweeet! i ever so hoped that you would like it  :)



i'll hang up and listen ...

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