Eleazar's simplified Photoshop process for Seamless Tiles
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- Eleazar
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
Eleazar's simplified Photoshop process for Seamless Tiles
I know that everyone doesn't have Photoshop, but I thought it might be helpful to some to see the process I developed. Your mileage with other applications may vary...
1) Download the attached file in Fig. 1. It includes 3 "actions" for photoshop as well as a template (with guides to assist in aligning tiles).
2) Fig. 2 A blank slate.
3) Fig. 3 Lets say I went mad and wanted to add a Polka-dot terrain to the game. I'd begin like this: (Note: I have a layer that I constrain the drawing too so I don't have to worry about going outside the lines.) Warning if using my actions don't delete the "Master Shape" Layer. Otherwise it won't work.
4) Now I take advantage of the wonders of automation. I run the "Fix Edges" action. It duplicates the tile 3 times, rearranges them all so each duplicate takes up 1/3rd of the center and crops away the excess. See Fig. 4.
5) Yikes! My edges didn't line up. But now that the edges are on the
inside of the tile i can fix them up, knowing that the outside edges are seamless with each other. I patch it up as in Fig. 5.
6) Now I repeat steps 4 and 5 until there are no more edge glitches. Eventually i'm happy. Note: Running "Fix Edges" three times in a row will reassemble the tile to its original form.
7) Now the edges are smooth, but I want to see how this terrain looks in a big chunk. I could duplicate it 16 times and arrange each piece, or I could run the "Repeat it!" action and get Fig 6. Note: the tile layer must be selected.
8 ) Now to create the basic transitions, I can chop up the "many tiles" layer and send them off to separate files, confident that they will line up with the main tile. As I'm doing this demo, I find I can't get the third action "Trans chop-up" to work. It's been a while since I last did this.
9) And so after all this hard work you get Fig. 7, a beautiful seamless polka-dot terrain.
1) Download the attached file in Fig. 1. It includes 3 "actions" for photoshop as well as a template (with guides to assist in aligning tiles).
2) Fig. 2 A blank slate.
3) Fig. 3 Lets say I went mad and wanted to add a Polka-dot terrain to the game. I'd begin like this: (Note: I have a layer that I constrain the drawing too so I don't have to worry about going outside the lines.) Warning if using my actions don't delete the "Master Shape" Layer. Otherwise it won't work.
4) Now I take advantage of the wonders of automation. I run the "Fix Edges" action. It duplicates the tile 3 times, rearranges them all so each duplicate takes up 1/3rd of the center and crops away the excess. See Fig. 4.
5) Yikes! My edges didn't line up. But now that the edges are on the
inside of the tile i can fix them up, knowing that the outside edges are seamless with each other. I patch it up as in Fig. 5.
6) Now I repeat steps 4 and 5 until there are no more edge glitches. Eventually i'm happy. Note: Running "Fix Edges" three times in a row will reassemble the tile to its original form.
7) Now the edges are smooth, but I want to see how this terrain looks in a big chunk. I could duplicate it 16 times and arrange each piece, or I could run the "Repeat it!" action and get Fig 6. Note: the tile layer must be selected.
8 ) Now to create the basic transitions, I can chop up the "many tiles" layer and send them off to separate files, confident that they will line up with the main tile. As I'm doing this demo, I find I can't get the third action "Trans chop-up" to work. It's been a while since I last did this.
9) And so after all this hard work you get Fig. 7, a beautiful seamless polka-dot terrain.
- Attachments
-
- Fig. 3
- Fig-3.png (10.86 KiB) Viewed 8750 times
-
- Fig. 2
- Fig-2.png (1.26 KiB) Viewed 8753 times
-
- hex actions & template.zip
- Fig. 1
- (6.54 KiB) Downloaded 1573 times
Last edited by Eleazar on October 7th, 2005, 4:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
- Eleazar
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
more figures:
- Attachments
-
- Fig. 6
- Fig-6.png (11.61 KiB) Viewed 8748 times
-
- Fig. 5
- Fig-5.png (15.22 KiB) Viewed 8742 times
-
- Fig. 4
- Fig-4.png (16.18 KiB) Viewed 8749 times
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
- Eleazar
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
The grand finale:
Hope this is helpful...
Hope this is helpful...
- Attachments
-
- Fig. 7
- Fig-7-PolkaDot.png (6.66 KiB) Viewed 8726 times
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
Cool.
How easy would it be to port these tools for use in the Gimp?
BTW: Welcome back.
How easy would it be to port these tools for use in the Gimp?
BTW: Welcome back.
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
The World of Orbivm
And I hate stupid people.
The World of Orbivm
Pretty easy. It's basically a hexagonal variant of the standard technique used for making tilable rectangles. It's about as straightforward as you can get.turin wrote:How easy would it be to port these tools for use in the Gimp?
"When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry" -- Catroaster
Legal, free live music: Surf Coasters at Double Down Saloon, Las Vegas on 2005-03-06. Tight, high-energy Japanese Surf-Rock.
Legal, free live music: Surf Coasters at Double Down Saloon, Las Vegas on 2005-03-06. Tight, high-energy Japanese Surf-Rock.
Yes, luckily, those times are gone. Nobody has to code in LISP or perl anymore
Attached is a gimp plugin which does something similiar to the photoshop one. To install, simply unzip into your gimp plugins folder. After that, Gimp should get a "Wesnoth" menu with two commands: "hex wrap", and "hex preview", which are to be applied on a 72x72 terrain image.
Attached is a gimp plugin which does something similiar to the photoshop one. To install, simply unzip into your gimp plugins folder. After that, Gimp should get a "Wesnoth" menu with two commands: "hex wrap", and "hex preview", which are to be applied on a 72x72 terrain image.
- Attachments
-
- gimp-python-hex.zip
- (1.79 KiB) Downloaded 543 times
Did this ever make it into the wiki?
The gimp python script didn't work for me under linux - it wouldn't find the alphamask.png file. So I modified hexwrap.py to construct the mask in python.
I don't have Photoshop so I can't comment on that script, but the gimp one is quite useful.
As before, these just go in your gimp plug-ins directory.
The gimp python script didn't work for me under linux - it wouldn't find the alphamask.png file. So I modified hexwrap.py to construct the mask in python.
I don't have Photoshop so I can't comment on that script, but the gimp one is quite useful.
As before, these just go in your gimp plug-ins directory.
- Attachments
-
- gimp-python-hex-tools.zip
- modified gimp-python hex-wrap and hex-preview
- (1.23 KiB) Downloaded 1431 times
No - if someone wants to do it for me, put it right next to Freim's tutorial:yobbo wrote:Did this ever make it into the wiki?
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Art_Tutorials with a name like: How To Make Seamless Tiles.
you can do this by going here:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/How_To_Make_Seamless_Tiles
And I can clean things up later - even just pasting the majority of the text into there with save me /mad/ time.
- Eleazar
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
I patially put in on the wiki. I don't have the knack of all this wiki stuff yet.
1) I try to upload the graphics files:
2) it askes me to log in.
3) I log in.
4) goto step 1
I suppose it really means i don't have rights to upload images, or it could be because i'm behind a serious proxy.
1) I try to upload the graphics files:
2) it askes me to log in.
3) I log in.
4) goto step 1
I suppose it really means i don't have rights to upload images, or it could be because i'm behind a serious proxy.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
no....actually it turns out that we're not allowed to upload images onto the wiki. I asked The Manâ„¢ (ettin), himself, and that is what he said. We can post 'em on the forum, and link them from there, but not onto the wiki. What you are getting is a bug where it pretends you can, but you really still can't.Eleazar wrote:I patially put in on the wiki. I don't have the knack of all this wiki stuff yet.
1) I try to upload the graphics files:
2) it askes me to log in.
3) I log in.
4) goto step 1
I suppose it really means i don't have rights to upload images, or it could be because i'm behind a serious proxy.
Given that he gives us free bandwidth, I'm cool with that policy.