I really like constructing in OpenSim, however I don’t love the method of discovering or creating textures.
It’s arduous to seek out simply the fitting one, and even more durable to determine its license phrases. All these texture packs floating round — are they reliable? 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 perform that can generate free, distinctive, seamless textures on demand.
Simply kind 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 newest model, model 4, doesn’t but assist tiles. Although, by the point you learn this, it effectively may.
Right here’s one of many outcomes:
Here’s what it seems like tiled:
You actually can’t inform the place the seams are. The sample is ideal.
Right here is likely one of the outcomes for the immediate “tree bark texture –tile –v 3“:
And right here it’s once more, so you’ll be able to see what it seems 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 more durable time getting it to give you a water texture. It stored wanting to provide 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 photographs to start out with, then the essential plan is $10 a month. I’m on the $30 a month plan, which supplies you limitless photographs so long as you turn to “calm down” mode.
The free, open supply different: Secure Diffusion
I’m a fan of Midjourney as a result of it’s comparatively simple to get one thing you need that appears nice.
You possibly can see how they improved final 12 months on this picture development:
However there’s additionally free, open supply different — Secure Diffusion — and it additionally has a tile perform.
You possibly can dowload the mannequin and run it on your property pc or in Google Colab to entry the performance, which requires technical expertise and, for working it regionally, a robust pc with an Nvidia graphics card.
Luckily, there are many websites that present easy entrance ends for Secure Diffusion-based photographs. 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 photographs are 1,024 by 1,024 pixels, which is an excellent dimension for textures. The photographs are simple to generate, and simple to obtain nevertheless it’s not precisely clear what the utilization phrases are for the free content material. You possibly can see all of the seamless textures that their customers have generated on their community showcase.
Should you mouse over the pictures, you’ll be able to see the prompts used to create them, and you may then use the identical prompts to create your personal, distinctive, variations of the identical textures.
For instance, I noticed a reasonably rose quarts texture on the neighborhood web page, grabbed the immediate — “Lifelike Quartz Female Rose Gold Marble Texture, hyper life like, intricate element, portray, illustration, {photograph}” — and generated my very own model:
Right here it’s, tiled:
In truth, lots of the low-cost and free on-line apps which are constructed on prime of Secure Diffusion can present seamless textures, no technical expertise required. Sort of. This isn’t the official tiling perform, I don’t assume, as a result of the outcomes aren’t at all times seamless. In my testing, they got here out seamless about 90 % 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, the truth is, seamless:
I believe it will make for cute wallpaper for a child’s bed room. Plus, Lexica Artwork additionally provides you very giant photographs — 2,560 pixels sq.. These are glorious textures.
Should you haven’t tried out Lexica Artwork but, it’s loads of enjoyable. You get 100 free photographs a month, and if you happen to want extra, you’ll be able to improve to 1,000 for $8 per 30 days.
An alternative choice is Mage.Space, which supplies you a limiteless variety of free photographs. Simply add “seamless sample” to the tip of your immediate and ask for sq. photographs.
Right here’s the picture for the immediate “flowers seamless sample”:
And right here it’s, tiled, to indicate that it’s, the truth is, 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 just like waht Artistic Fabrica generated.
Different AI texture platforms
Secure Diffusion isn’t the one strategy to go.
One free web site is Poly, which appears to supply limitless AI-powered texture technology 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 technology may 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 enroll in an account earlier than utilizing it, however you get limitless, quick photographs, utilizing a selection of Secure Diffusion or Dall-E 2 because the AI engine.
Free AI texture websites
You may as well use textures that different individuals have generated.
Free Textures for 3D has an enormous assortment of a whole lot of textures, all free and distributed below the Artistic Commons 0 license, which is public area, which means that the textures can be utilized in any approach, together with business.
One other assortment of free AI-generated textures is on the market at Pixela.AI. Most are seamless, however some clearly aren’t, so tile them and test earlier than utilizing.
Secure Diffusion assets 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 possibility 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 cost effective piece of junk I may discover. (The times of me working OpenSim servers on my house pc are far, far prior to now.)
Google Colab is, from what I may inform, a free service that Google affords that lets individuals run software program on their cloud totally free. 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:
Notice the “Tiling” checkbox on the backside of the display. The picture it produced for the immediate “second life water texture” was a bit on the inexperienced facet, so I reran it once more with “gentle blue second life water texture.”
Right here’s the primary outcome I obtained:
And right here it’s, tiled:
That isn’t dangerous in any respect. And it didn’t take any time to create.
The default dimension is 512 by 512, however you’ll be able to change the sliders all the best way as much as 2048 by 2048.
Secure Diffusion requires extra work than Midjourney to get a great picture out of it. Right here’s a great useful resource for some great Stable Diffusion prompts to get you started.
Simply bear in mind to uncheck the “Tiling” possibility when you’re not on the lookout for seamless textures. In any other case, your outcomes will look tremendous bizarre.
I’m presently 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 hassle shoot? No, no, I don’t — not when there’s loads of simple, free websites on the market I can use.
