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Two Great Gimp Texture Plugins

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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.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

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 Head of Community at Sketchfab.

13 Comments

  1. In the not yet released version of blender, they have introduced nodes. I wanted to know if it is possible to make a Gimp node. This would allow you to use any effect and/or image manipulation tool on textures in blender.

  2. great article! i have known the resynthesizer but am glad i found the texturizer.

    also for windows users in the texturizer link go for the michael schumacher link as he seems to be one of the few to create compiled version of gimp plugins for windows. there i have finally found the long time looked for plasma2 for windows plugin

    great articles here. read them every day! :-)

  3. I got a wonderful glimpse of the Resynthesizer when Orange was pleading for CC photos. The texture generator in Photoshop is weak IMO by comparison, and I'm quite pleased that there are a few plugins that make the GIMP have the upper hand. The only experience I've had with a GIMP plugin previously is the Verse connectivity one by Eskil & friends, but it failed to ever work on Windows...

    Anyhow, more power to the realtime engine people.

    I did notice that on the Texturize site, the author states that the plugin doesn't do well with large changes in lightness over the photograph. Well, look no further than "The Power of the High Pass Filter", one of the best & most useful texture tutorials of all time.

    Found online here http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010523/hajba_01.htm
    To get past the login wall, use bugmenot.com

    Its not quite the same as the original article, which has been offline for a few years, but it gives you the same info. So, with the high pass knowledge, and a super-great texture generation plugin, and a regular stamping tool, you've got the power to texture the world! :D

  4. I tested the texturizer plugin... First time I've cracked open the Gimp for anything in a long time, and boy was I impressed!

    Great work to those developers and I look forward to using it extensively.

  5. As far as I can tell, it just tiles the source image with a certain overlap area where it applies a smooth fade. That's not a lot better than the integrated Map->Make Seamless filter...

  6. I know this is an old post, but yesterday I was looking for something like that and I've found this page.
    Then, keeping wondering around, I've found somewhere a plugin to remove gradients from images. This plugin I'm quite sure was made from the same guy of Texturize or Resynthesizer, but I can't manage to find it again (when I've found this plugin I didn't think I would have need it, but now I need it :) ).

    Anyone here can help me to find this plugin? It "just" remove gradients from images (e.g.: a wall where the light degrade vertically).

    Thanks in advance.

    Andrea

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