I like constructing in OpenSim, however I don’t love the method of discovering or creating textures.
It’s laborious to search out simply the fitting one, and even tougher 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 might 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 may 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 most recent model, model 4, doesn’t but assist tiles. Although, by the point you learn this, it properly would possibly.
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 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 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 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 a substitute of a top-down view. It additionally tried giving me waves as a substitute 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 “mild blue seamless water texture for second life –tile –v 3.” That labored:
Right here it’s, tiled:
Midjourney presents 25 free photos to start out with, then the fundamental plan is $10 a month. I’m on the $30 a month plan, which supplies you limitless photos 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’ll be able to 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’ll be able to dowload the mannequin and run it on your house laptop or in Google Colab to entry the performance, which requires technical expertise and, for operating it domestically, a strong laptop 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 accessible to those that improve.
Creative Fabrica has a free online seamless repeating pattern generator. Right here’s the end result for the immediate “mild blue second life water texture”:
The pictures are 1,024 by 1,024 pixels, which is an excellent measurement for textures. The pictures are simple 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.
If you happen to mouse over the photographs, you possibly can see the prompts used to create them, and you’ll 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 — “Real looking Quartz Female Rose Gold Marble Texture, hyper lifelike, intricate element, portray, illustration, {photograph}” — and generated my very own model:
Right here it’s, tiled:
Actually, most 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. Form of. This isn’t the official tiling perform, I don’t assume, as a result of the outcomes aren’t all the time 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 wished however is, the truth is, seamless:
I believe it could make for cute wallpaper for a child’s bed room. Plus, Lexica Artwork additionally provides you very giant photos — 2,560 pixels sq.. These are glorious textures.
If you happen to haven’t tried out Lexica Artwork but, it’s quite a lot of enjoyable. You get 100 free photos a month, and for those who want extra, you possibly can improve to 1,000 for $8 monthly.
Another choice is Mage.Space, which supplies you a vast 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 point out 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 simply accessible 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 website 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 photographs you created. However you don’t want to enroll to start out creating textures.
It’s a quite simple interface, and the feel era may be very quick.
Within the screenshot beneath, I requested for a “colourful stone path” texture:
One other easy-to-use and free AI texture generator is Polycam.
Simplified additionally presents 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 can even use textures that different individuals have generated.
Free Textures for 3D has a large assortment of a whole bunch of textures, all free and distributed below the Artistic Commons 0 license, which is public area, that means that the textures can be utilized in any means, together with industrial.
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 sources for hard-core nerds
If you wish to run Secure Diffusion your self, with all of the uncooked performance the mannequin presents, I recommend this tutorial. That’s the one I adopted to get it operating.
I used the Google Colab possibility as a result of my laptop is optimized for phrase processing. In different phrases, I solely use it to put in writing, so I purchased the most affordable piece of junk I might discover. (The times of me operating OpenSim servers on my residence laptop are far, far previously.)
Google Colab is, from what I might inform, a free service that Google presents that lets individuals run software program on their cloud at no cost. It’s particularly designed for operating 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 operating and create my first texture:
Be aware the “Tiling” checkbox on the backside of the display screen. The picture it produced for the immediate “second life water texture” was slightly on the inexperienced facet, so I reran it once more with “mild blue second life water texture.”
Right here’s the primary end result I acquired:
And right here it’s, tiled:
That isn’t dangerous 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 way in which as much as 2048 by 2048.
Secure Diffusion requires extra work than Midjourney to get an excellent picture out of it. Right here’s an excellent useful resource for some great Stable Diffusion prompts to get you started.
Simply bear in mind to uncheck the “Tiling” possibility when you’re now not on the lookout for seamless textures. In any other case, your outcomes will look tremendous bizarre.
I’m at present 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.