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Create Tiles/Pattern Repeats?


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4 hours ago, Bri-Toon said:

Actually, the result of that second picture that MaryLou used to demonstrate came out very well when I tried it in Designer.

In your screenshot, the flamingo with the grey mottled neck has been beheaded, the blue-necked one reduced to an indistinct blue smear, & another one has legs growing out of its neck:

5a67013dd3d8e_tiledetail.png.87afff8e1e3ed2f8f2f388f4705db58b.png

This might be OK for a very casual web page background, but probably not for much else.

 

Also, if you look at MaryLou's first screenshot carefully, you can see a number of diagonally repeating elements:

5a670bb1d693c_diagonalsonbirds.png.c6e3994e86daa5d94c0c3617edcdb0ab.png

This suggests that the image was captured from what was originally a larger image that was generated from a composite of the individual elements (the 6 birds & the several different fern shapes) repeated at regular intervals on those diagonals to create a seamless tile pattern. Except for the incomplete #2 flamingo, something like that could be created from her screenshot by laboriously selecting each bird & its nearby fern parts, copying each of them to a new layer, & then duplicating & aligning all of them on the diagonals to create an image that could be flattened & cropped to create a seamless tile pattern.

 

I don't know of any app that could do that automatically, but obviously the process would be greatly simplified if each element was available separately to begin with. Back in the Mac System 7 & 8 days there was an app called TextureScape from now defunct Specular International capable of creating something similar built up from vector shapes using programable repletion rates, angles, & layers. I own & once used that app but sadly it won't run on any modern Mac (it was compiled for the 68020 CPU family). I still have several of the seamless tiles I created with it, saved in EPS or PNG formats (examples below) but I never tried anything as complex as the bird pattern.

5a671922662a6_SpatStuccoTS.png.a2ba2d3758b1bfdb5b78fed9725aface.png 5a671b903da19_Ivoryknitrug.png.bc9abb02c917cb7002ac501fd6211e80.png

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6 hours ago, MaryLou said:

There was an oldie by Ulead called PhotoImpact.  It was purchased by Corel around 2008 and since Corel also sells PaintShopPro, they discontinued PhotoImpact which eliminated some of the competition. That was a shame because PhotoImpact was a far better program.

 

I presume your use of PhotoImpact led directly to your acquisition of the PIRCnet.com domain name. detective.gif

 

For those who don’t know, PIRCnet used to be the PhotoImpact Resource Center. I never used PI myself, but I picked up some nice stuff from there; I think that’s where I first found the ‘De-Tube’ utility for extracting the images from PSP tubes.

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5 hours ago, R C-R said:

I don't know of any app that could do that automatically, but obviously the process would be greatly simplified if each element was available separately to begin with.

 

That is just the thing. In the example MaryLou gave, there don't seem to be any point that marks a pattern. The flamingos themselves would have to be repositioned or redrawn, but that would be annoying. So the result she is looking for cannot be perfect unfortunately. If there were a feature in which you could drag a drawing partially off the bottom of the canvas and then the bottom half is shown coming from the top, then that would make things so much easier. Figuring out a seamless tile this complex is a very difficult job.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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8 hours ago, Alfred said:

 

I presume your use of PhotoImpact led directly to your acquisition of the PIRCnet.com domain name. detective.gif

 

For those who don’t know, PIRCnet used to be the PhotoImpact Resource Center. I never used PI myself, but I picked up some nice stuff from there; I think that’s where I first found the ‘De-Tube’ utility for extracting the images from PSP tubes.

Alfred, you have a very good memory.  Yes, PIRCnet.com did derive from PhotoImpact back in the last century.  :)  Once that was discontinued, we changed to PaintShopPro but none of us liked it. We eventually found DrawPlus and loved it.  But, we all know what happened to that. So now, we are an Affinity forum and hope to stay that way for a long time to come.

In PhotoImpact, you open your pattern, drag a selection line around the area you want to keep for your pattern, then select the Seamless Tile option.  PhotoImpact opens a window with suggested values that you can change, or not.  Click the button and it's done. I'm attaching an image to show what I mean as well as how my seamless tile came out.  This is not perfet by any means, but it works better than anything else around.  I don't think that people looking at patterns really dissect them and check for perfection - at least, I don't.  It would be difficult to see where this image was manipulated to make it seamless unless that's what you were searching for.  I'm hoping that eventually, we will have such a feature in Affinity Designer. 

example.jpg

seamless2.jpg

Windows 10 Home
Affinity Designer 1.6.4.104
Affinity Photo 1.6.4.104

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28 minutes ago, MaryLou said:

It would be difficult to see where this image was manipulated to make it seamless unless that's what you were searching for.

This is what I get using that image for a 4 x 4 tiled background:

4x4.png.9a2a143a88c2f6a09c4eaa1b3df9fbc0.png

The most obvious seam is present in the original outlined section of your first screenshot but there is also a seam where the edges of the tiles met that becomes increasingly obvious as more tiles are added to the texture, over & beyond the imperfections due to starting with a lossy jpeg image file.

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Certainly it would help to have all of the imagery.

 

This more complete image was easy to find. I don't think it would be too much of a problem now.

Maybe not the one button magic that @MaryLou is looking for.... but doable.

92.2_1068.thumb.jpg.a0dbf763efe310f72dd6d1c445c585e8.jpg

 

Edit: This was pretty quick (.....certainly not super perfect).

BTW... look at the quality degradation from the Affine filter. The internal Nearest Neighbor rasterization has got to go. Basically it's Auto Destroy.

flamingo crop B.png

 

imgonline-com-ua-TextureSeamless-xswX20sHOVvOn_TILE.thumb.jpg.fca391e3056b718683f396032a2afa36.jpg

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20 minutes ago, MaryLou said:

Okay, are you going to let us in on the secret?  Your results look pretty good!  

 

No real secret. I think the same method outlined in other posts.

Except now all of the elements needed are there.

I used the image above (the one with the ruler) to create a full image with everything needed. (it took three images)

5a67e8fe6fef5_ScreenShot2018-01-23at8_56_15PM.thumb.png.742c5e434d94e20addb458d365d3162f.png

 

Used a clip (illustrated here by the black outlined box....made by eye and some guides) of the composite as a start to the tile.

Took that into APhoto and used the gawd awful Affine filter (50% and 50% shift), and stretched some things to fit with the warp tool.

(The last step is necessary because this is a photo. The lens warp makes even identical elements slightly different. Wouldn't have been needed if it were a flat scan.)

 

Oh. and I used the dodge brush (midtones) a little to match lightness along some edges.

 

Edit: if I were to do it again I'd skip the Affine and just move things manually....

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Thanks for explaining it but.... unfortunately, I am not a Photo user.  I use Designer. I have the program but do not know how to use it and at the moment, don't have the time for it.  There is a tutorial on YouTube that someone wrote on making seamless tiles in Designer.  I tried it but didn't get very far because it has no audio and the cursor moves faster than I can keep up with it, even with the video slowed down. 

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Affinity Designer 1.6.4.104
Affinity Photo 1.6.4.104

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1 hour ago, JimmyJack said:

(The last step is necessary because this is a photo. The lens warp makes even identical elements slightly different. Wouldn't have been needed if it were a flat scan.)

Thanks for that!!! It was driving me crazy that I could not just duplicate the jpeg from this topic to at least get everything except the MIA part of the blue-necked bird to line up or color-match.

 

Also, had this been a flat scan that did not require stretching, do you think the Affine filter would have produced such awful results? I wasn't aware that by itself the Affine filter would involve any resampling, unless it was not pixel aligned....

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Well, if nothing else, this post provided a little food for thought. :)  This might eventually become a feature in AP or AD that can be used with ease.  Things like this are what cause features to be added, especially if they are not easily done in other programs.  Always nice to beat the competition!

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2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Also, had this been a flat scan that did not require stretching, do you think the Affine filter would have produced such awful results? I wasn't aware that by itself the Affine filter would involve any resampling, unless it was not pixel aligned....

 

Hmmm. Not really sure what's going on now.

The Affine shift all by itself introduced the blurriness, not the stretching.

Maybe it is a pixel align thing, but everything looks fine pixel wise in the transform panel (and yes both pix align & whole pix are on). Yet a similar image is fine run through the filter. Something is happening....

It just feels beyond my control.

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4 hours ago, JimmyJack said:

... and stretched some things to fit with the warp tool.

(The last step is necessary because this is a photo. The lens warp makes even identical elements slightly different. Wouldn't have been needed if it were a flat scan.)

 

Oh. and I used the dodge brush (midtones) a little to match lightness along some edges.

 

Edit: if I were to do it again I'd skip the Affine and just move things manually....

 

I tried to use a similar image in AD, without the ruler and without any obvious lightness mismatches, but I couldn’t understand why things didn’t line up correctly (and, of course, I couldn’t persuade them to line up just by moving and stretching them this way and that).

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4 hours ago, JimmyJack said:

Hmmm. Not really sure what's going on now.

The Affine shift all by itself introduced the blurriness, not the stretching.

Maybe it is a pixel align thing, but everything looks fine pixel wise in the transform panel (and yes both pix align & whole pix are on). Yet a similar image is fine run through the filter. Something is happening....

It just feels beyond my control.

For what very little it is worth, I did some quick & dirty experiments applying the Affine filter to several different images of various pixel dimensions, some photos & others 'synthetic' ones consisting of flattened vector shapes. I tried using unusual offset & scale values like 1.5% & 98% respectively & various rotations like 23° & such. For a few of the synthetic ones I also intentionally set the x/y or w/h values to fractional pixels before flattening so nothing was pixel aligned to begin with.

 

I could get some minimal amount of blurring, but nothing as dramatic as what you got -- at most a 2 pixel wide edge effect for the synthetic images, even when I took the scale factor up to values like 234%. For photo images of typical pixel dimensions there was no noticeable blurring at all.

 

From this I realized that I was wrong about the Affine filter not ever involving resampling -- obviously it has to do that for rotating or scaling at the least -- but that does not explain (at least to me) why I could never get the extreme amount of blurring you could, even when I was trying to.

 

That said, there are definitely some strange things about how this filter works. For one, the Status Bar says "Interact with canvas and / or panel to set effect parameters" but I can see no way to interact with it on the canvas. I thought at the least this might allow me to set the rotation center interactively, but it always seems to be set to the top left edge of the canvas, even when the canvas is transparent & larger than the selected pixel layer(s) on it I am applying the filter to. The Affine help topic says in part:

Quote

The Affine filter allows you to move, scale and rotate either a selection or the entire document by percentage amounts.

However, unless at least one pixel layer is selected everything on the Filters menu is greyed out, & if a multi-layered document contains a vector shape layer, even if all layers are selected, the filter ignores the vector layer ... so there seems to be no way to apply the filter to the "entire document."

 

There are some other potential oddities I am still exploring that occur when I change the Extend Mode on pixel layers smaller than the canvas size that are being scaled or rotated, but it could just be that I don't understand how these things are supposed to interact at the document or layer level ... or something.

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  • 3 months later...
On 10/18/2016 at 6:14 AM, Alfred said:

You can enter calculations in the boxes on the Transform panel. If you have an 8" square with an object overhanging the left-hand edge, you just need to duplicate the object and set the X value for the duplicate to +=8" or +=8in

Hi, I have just downloaded Affinity photo today and am already in a muddle as I'm used to photoshop. How do I duplicate the object as stated above? I would like to duplicate a motif and place it exactly 4 inches to the right, I am trying to make a tile for a repeat pattern. Should I have bought Affinity Designer? I don't want to work with vector images though. Thank you, hope this makes sense.

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  • Staff

Hi Tracy,

 

Welcome to the forums. The easiest way would be as you described. Duplicate the object, and in the transform pane, type in +=4in , or x+4in and this will move it 4inch to the right. " + " will move it to the right, while " - " will move it to the left. 

 

Thanks,

Gabe. 

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Hi, I got the tiles to work just fine, thank you:D One more question, I'd like to change the black butterflies to a different colour, the selection brush seems to pick up the whole shape of the butterfly rather than the black outlines, I also tried to select the black with the flood select tool but that only picked up one bit at a time. Is there a way to select just the black outlines and fill with a new colour? Thank you!

Butterflies Scatter Repeat.jpg

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36 minutes ago, Tracy said:

I also tried to select the black with the flood select tool but that only picked up one bit at a time

 

You need to disable the ‘Contiguous’ option. With a suitable adjustment of the tolerance setting you should be able to select all of the dark grey outlines, and you can then duplicate the selected region so that you can recolour it without affecting anything else. One simple way to recolour a black layer is to create a Fill layer of the desired colour on top and set the blend mode of that Fill layer to ‘Screen’.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 2 years later...

Hi Mary Lou, (and any other surface pattern designers out there who need this)

I came across this post just now while looking for the same solution (sometimes it's easy to think that we surface pattern types get overlooked!)

Anyway, my quick and easy solution has so far been the following using the freely available GIMP software.......(which was once always considered the best free alternative to Photoshop)

  1. Import the image to be tiled as a PNG file.
  2. in the main toolbar above click FILTERS, then hover over MAP and finally select the TILE option.
  3. In the dialogue box that appears type in the required file size (I generally use pixels instead of an alternative) click ok and the finished document will appear! 

If Affinity ever provide their own alternative, be assured I'll be one of the first to use it.

Kind Regards

Dannythedog11 (otherwise known as Justsurfaced18 on instagram if you fancy taking a look) 

 

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  • 5 months later...

Hi everyone involved in this thread. I post here because I think and hope have a usefull finding.

Affinity Publisher introduced in a recent beta a data merge function. To create repeating layouts that contain the merged data (like adresses for a phone listing) they also introduced a 'Data Merge Layout Tool'. With this you can create grids of any number of rows and colums and whatever is designed in the first grid cell gets repeated in all other cells automatically. There is no need to use merged data.

In other words this new tool can be used to create seamless patterns. I did a first try and it seems to work pretty well. Maybe some of you are interested in this and want to try it by themselves.

Cheers,
d.

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