Toolbox

Two Great Gimp Texture Plugins

Bart ·

TexturizerHere are two great plugins that will help you make textures with the Gimp: Texturize and Resynthesizer.

Texturize creates tilable textures:

Imagine that you have an image with a small sample of a texture. If you want to generate a larger texture with this small image, you could just copy-paste it, and put the copies (or “patches”) one next to another, but that wouldn’t produce a very good result, since the right (or top) part of the image usually doesn’t correspond to its left (or bottom) part, when two copies of the image are assembled.
A few images are indeed designed to be copy-pasted one next to another and still look natural, but the result is usually periodic and very monotonous (it looks like wallpaper — the one on your walls, not the one on your computer desktop!).
Texturize lets you actually create tileable textures (which is great for game design).

Resynthesizer is a bit more complex;

Resynthesizer is a Gimp plug-in for texture synthesis. Given a sample of a texture, it can create more of that texture. This has a surprising number of uses:

  • Creating more of a texture (including creation of tileable textures)
  • Removing objects from images (great for touching up photos)
  • Creating themed images (such as the Resynthesizer logo above)

I recommend you check out the websites for some samples. Thanks to Mike Edwards for pointing these out on Elysiun.

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
Advertisement