I really like constructing in OpenSim, however I don’t love the method of discovering or creating textures.
It’s exhausting to seek out simply the fitting one, and even more durable to determine its license phrases. All these texture packs floating round — are they respectable? Or are they ripped off from Second Life?
For some time, anytime I went wherever in actual life I’d take photos 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 newest 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 to be like 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 appears to be like 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 saved wanting to offer me a horizontal view of the water, from the aspect, 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 high down view,” “water ripples clear ocean high 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 affords 25 free photos to begin 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: Steady 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 yr on this picture development:
However there’s additionally free, open supply various — Steady Diffusion — and it additionally has a tile operate.
You possibly can dowload the mannequin and run it on your own home pc or in Google Colab to entry the performance, which requires technical abilities and, for working it domestically, a strong pc with an Nvidia graphics card.
Thankfully, there are many websites that present easy entrance ends for Steady Diffusion-based photos. Many supply free plans, with extra options obtainable to those that improve.
Creative Fabrica has a free online seamless repeating pattern generator. Right here’s the outcome for the immediate “mild blue second life water texture”:
The pictures are 1,024 by 1,024 pixels, which is an excellent dimension for textures. The pictures are simple to generate, and straightforward 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’ll then use the identical prompts to create your individual, 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 lifelike, intricate element, portray, illustration, {photograph}” — and generated my very own model:
Right here it’s, tiled:
In actual fact, lots of the low-cost and free on-line apps which are constructed on high of Steady Diffusion can present seamless textures, no technical abilities required. Form of. This isn’t the official tiling operate, 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 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, in truth, seamless:
I feel it will make for cute wallpaper for a child’s bed room. Plus, Lexica Artwork additionally provides you very massive photos — 2,560 pixels sq.. These are glorious textures.
Should you haven’t tried out Lexica Artwork but, it’s a variety of enjoyable. You get 100 free photos a month, and in case you want extra, you’ll be able to improve to 1,000 for $8 per 30 days.
Another choice is Mage.Space, which supplies you an infinite variety of free photos. Simply add “seamless sample” to the tip 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, in truth, seamless:
Weirdly, Mage.House saved 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-about NSWF? Who is aware of! However rerolling the identical immediate did give me outcomes, although it took me a number of fairly a number of tries to get one thing just like waht Inventive Fabrica generated.
Different AI texture platforms
Steady Diffusion isn’t the one option to go.
One free website 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 begin creating textures.
It’s a quite simple interface, and the feel technology 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 enroll in an account earlier than utilizing it, however you get limitless, quick photos, utilizing a selection of Steady Diffusion or Dall-E 2 because the AI engine.
Free AI texture websites
You too can 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 underneath 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 accessible at Pixela.AI. Most are seamless, however some clearly aren’t, so tile them and verify earlier than utilizing.
Steady Diffusion assets for hard-core nerds
If you wish to run Steady 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 put in writing, 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 without cost. 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 screen. The picture it produced for the immediate “second life water texture” was a little bit on the inexperienced aspect, so I reran it once more with “mild blue second life water texture.”
Right here’s the primary outcome I received:
And right here it’s, tiled:
That isn’t unhealthy 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 way in which as much as 2048 by 2048.
Steady 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 keep 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 present utilizing Steady 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 Steady Diffusion stopped working. Do I care sufficient about this to bother shoot? No, no, I don’t — not when there’s loads of simple, free websites on the market I can use.
