Creation of a seamless texture from a model

Question

I would like to create a seamless normal map from a model I constructed.

First I made a model

Then I baked a texture in Cycles as a Normal map to a squared plane, with a non-seamless result

As a next step I unwrapped a square plane, arranged its duplicates that shared the same mesh (made with Alt-D) to see a seamless pattern, and by manipulating uv map, made sure that the texture on the plane is seamless

What is a good way to transfer the seamless part of the square back to a new texture? I managed to do that with baking Emit like below, but I guess there is a better way?

"Baking Emit" method is clunky because after it is done I have to crop transparent part from the image and resize it back to 1024x1024 size

You don't need that much texture, if it is truly a repeating pattern you only need one single tile or module of image, you can either get away with a much smaller texture, or get a lot better definition from the same size. Anyway you are probably better off baking or rendering a seamless pattern directly from the original object by properly adjusting and orthographic camera above it, or a correclty sized plane — Duarte Farrajota Ramos, Apr 02 '17 at 01:02
it is a good point Duarte, I could use much smaller texture, and by proper calculations figure out exact parameters for orthographic camera. I would still like to know though if there is a way to 'crop' an image using uv-map data — dimus, Apr 04 '17 at 17:59
The Vector Mapping node does have a min and max limiting factor which could, I think, be used for image cropping. — Duarte Farrajota Ramos, Apr 04 '17 at 22:21
Thanks sambler, great tutorial, although a bit tangental to the question — dimus, Apr 05 '17 at 13:43

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 04 '17 at 18:07

2

Use another UV map for target image

The parts you must crop are created by the usage of the same UV map for both the source image and the target.

If you create another UVmap for your object that is filling completely your target image space and set up proper relations for the images coordinates like in the image below, you should be able to achieve a cropping of the image.

answered Apr 04 '17 at 18:07

Carlo

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good point! No image manipulation anymore, however still baking a perfectly fine image second time (in Emit mode) – dimus Apr 05 '17 at 13:46

Creation of a seamless texture from a model

1 Answers1

Use another UV map for target image