I like constructing in OpenSim, however I don’t love the method of discovering or creating textures.
It’s onerous to search out simply the appropriate one, and even tougher to determine its license phrases. All these texture packs floating round — are they legit? Or are they ripped off from Second Life?
For some time, anytime I went anyplace in actual life I’d take footage of rock partitions, brick partitions, asphalt, tree bark — something that I may flip right into a texture. Then I’d use Gimp to course of the picture, in a painstaking and labor-intensive course of.
Seems, my favourite AI picture generator — Midjourney — has a tile operate that can generate free, distinctive, seamless textures on demand.
Simply sort a command like the next:
/think about flower texture –tile –v 3
The “–tile” command is what makes it seamless, and the “–v 3” command signifies that you really want model 3 of the AI mannequin. The most recent model, model 4, doesn’t but help tiles. Although, by the point you learn this, it effectively would possibly.
Right here’s one of many outcomes:
Here’s what it appears like tiled:
You actually can’t inform the place the seams are. The sample is ideal.
Right here is among the outcomes for the immediate “tree bark texture –tile –v 3“:
And right here it’s once more, so you possibly can see what it appears like tiled:
Right here’s one of many outcomes for the immediate “black white and grey marble –tile –v 3”:
And right here it’s once more, tiled:
Right here’s one of many outcomes for the immediate “bricks –tile –v 3”:
And right here it’s once more, tiled:
I had a tougher time getting it to provide you with a water texture. It stored wanting to present me a horizontal view of the water, from the facet, as an alternative of a top-down view. It additionally tried giving me waves as an alternative of tiny ripples.
I attempted asking for “water,” “water floor,” “water prime down view,” “water ripples clear ocean prime down view,” “tiny water ripples on floor of ocean, top-down view,” and “barely seen water ripples on floor of nonetheless tropical ocean, top-down view.” No go.
I lastly requested for “gentle blue seamless water texture for second life –tile –v 3.” That labored:
Right here it’s, tiled:
Midjourney affords 25 free photos to start out with, then the essential plan is $10 a month. I’m on the $30 a month plan, which supplies you limitless photos so long as you turn to “chill out” mode.
The free, open supply various: Secure Diffusion
I’m a fan of Midjourney as a result of it’s comparatively straightforward to get one thing you need that appears nice.
You’ll be able to see how they improved final yr on this picture development:
However there’s additionally free, open supply various — Secure Diffusion — and it additionally has a tile operate.
You’ll be able to dowload the mannequin and run it on your house pc or in Google Colab to entry the performance, which requires technical expertise and, for working it domestically, a strong pc with an Nvidia graphics card.
Luckily, there are many websites that present easy entrance ends for Secure Diffusion-based photos. Many provide free plans, with further options obtainable to those that improve.
Creative Fabrica has a free online seamless repeating pattern generator. Right here’s the outcome for the immediate “gentle blue second life water texture”:
The pictures are 1,024 by 1,024 pixels, which is an excellent measurement for textures. The pictures are straightforward to generate, and straightforward to obtain but it surely’s not precisely clear what the utilization phrases are for the free content material. You’ll be able to see all of the seamless textures that their customers have generated on their community showcase.
For those who mouse over the pictures, you possibly can see the prompts used to create them, and you’ll then use the identical prompts to create your individual, distinctive, variations of the identical textures.
For instance, I noticed a fairly rose quarts texture on the neighborhood web page, grabbed the immediate — “Real looking Quartz Female Rose Gold Marble Texture, hyper practical, intricate element, portray, illustration, {photograph}” — and generated my very own model:
Right here it’s, tiled:
In reality, most of the low-cost and free on-line apps which can be constructed on prime of Secure Diffusion can present seamless textures, no technical expertise required. Sort of. This isn’t the official tiling operate, I don’t suppose, as a result of the outcomes aren’t all the time seamless. In my testing, they got here out seamless about 90 p.c of the time.
For instance, right here’s the Lexica Art app, and the immediate “water seamless sample”:
It’s not the water texture I needed however is, actually, seamless:
I feel it will make for cute wallpaper for a child’s bed room. Plus, Lexica Artwork additionally offers you very massive photos — 2,560 pixels sq.. These are wonderful textures.
For those who haven’t tried out Lexica Artwork but, it’s a number of enjoyable. You get 100 free photos a month, and in case you want extra, you possibly can improve to 1,000 for $8 monthly.
Another choice is Mage.Space, which supplies you an infinite variety of free photos. Simply add “seamless sample” to the top of your immediate and ask for sq. photos.
Right here’s the picture for the immediate “flowers seamless sample”:
And right here it’s, tiled, to indicate that it’s, actually, seamless:
Weirdly, Mage.House stored giving me warnings for a lot of of my prompts, telling me that “NSFW content material is barely obtainable for premium members.” Why is a rose quarz texture thought of NSWF? Who is aware of! However rerolling the identical immediate did give me outcomes, although it took me a number of fairly just a few tries to get one thing much like waht Inventive Fabrica generated.
Different AI texture platforms
Secure Diffusion isn’t the one option to go.
One free web site is Poly, which appears to supply limitless AI-powered texture era in a quite simple interface. By signing up for a free account, it would additionally allow you to save the pictures you created. However you don’t want to enroll to start out creating textures.
It’s a quite simple interface, and the feel era could be very quick.
Within the screenshot under, I requested for a “colourful stone path” texture:
One other easy-to-use and free AI texture generator is Polycam.
Simplified additionally affords a free texture generator amongst its many AI instruments, with 1GB of storage. You do have to join an account earlier than utilizing it, however you get limitless, quick photos, utilizing a selection of Secure Diffusion or Dall-E 2 because the AI engine.
Free AI texture websites
You may also use textures that different individuals have generated.
Free Textures for 3D has a large assortment of lots of of textures, all free and distributed beneath the Inventive Commons 0 license, which is public area, which means that the textures can be utilized in any means, together with industrial.
One other assortment of free AI-generated textures is out there at Pixela.AI. Most are seamless, however some clearly aren’t, so tile them and test earlier than utilizing.
Secure Diffusion sources for hard-core nerds
If you wish to run Secure Diffusion your self, with all of the uncooked performance the mannequin affords, I recommend this tutorial. That’s the one I adopted to get it working.
I used the Google Colab choice as a result of my pc is optimized for phrase processing. In different phrases, I solely use it to jot down, so I purchased the most affordable piece of junk I may discover. (The times of me working OpenSim servers on my dwelling pc are far, far previously.)
Google Colab is, from what I may inform, a free service that Google affords that lets individuals run software program on their cloud free of charge. It’s particularly designed for working machine studying and AI code written in Python. Check out the official Google Colab FAQ for more info, including usage restrictions.
It took me about 5 minutes from begin to end to get it working and create my first texture:
Observe the “Tiling” checkbox on the backside of the display screen. The picture it produced for the immediate “second life water texture” was somewhat on the inexperienced facet, so I reran it once more with “gentle blue second life water texture.”
Right here’s the primary outcome I bought:
And right here it’s, tiled:
That isn’t unhealthy in any respect. And it didn’t take any time to create.
The default measurement is 512 by 512, however you possibly can change the sliders all the best way as much as 2048 by 2048.
Secure Diffusion requires extra work than Midjourney to get a superb picture out of it. Right here’s a superb useful resource for some great Stable Diffusion prompts to get you started.
Simply bear in mind to uncheck the “Tiling” choice when you’re not searching for seamless textures. In any other case, your outcomes will look tremendous bizarre.
I’m at the moment utilizing Secure Diffusion model 1.5, which is the “traditional” model. However there are newer variations popping out on a regular basis, some optimized to look extra like Midjourney.
Then, a few hours after I did this experiment, my Google Colab model of Secure Diffusion stopped working. Do I care sufficient about this to bother shoot? No, no, I don’t — not when there’s loads of straightforward, free websites on the market I can use.
