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Recipe for Instant Textures -
'Just add water' etc
Rule No 1
- there's no magic, witchcraft or superpowerful computer involved, anyone can
make these
Rule No 2
- You will need patience, a comfy chair, lot's of time, an eye for detail
and a vivid imagination !
Rule No 3 - Get
Paint Shop Pro and trawl the web for every freebie plugin and texture maker from
my Links
Right ! let's get started
!
Mandatory
ingredients: (the first three will do for basic stuff)
Paint Shop Pro Version
6
Greggs Factory Filter
Neology Filters
Rendersoft Illusionae
KPT 3 (Metacreations)
Harm's tile 99
How to Install the
Filters
Unzip the file to the
Plugin folder of Paint Shop Pro, if the directory doesn't exist create it.
Ensure you have the file
Msvcrt10.dll in you
Windows directory otherwise some of you plugins may not work, this is an easy
file to find and download from the web.
Open up Paint Shop Pro
and click on File - Preferences - General Progam Preferences - Plugin Filters
and specify the
plugin directory where all your plugins live, click on Ok and now we're ready to
make some serious textures !
Making a Basic Textured
Desktop Wallpaper
Open up Paint Shop Pro,
and make a new image for the size of your desktop.
From the top menu, click
on Image - Plugin Filters - Greggs Factory Output - Sine Blobs I
Play about with the
various sliders, don't mess about too much with the colours for now, the default
is Ok to start with
Click on Ok when you are
happy hey presto, your first base texture has arrived.
For the immediate
metallic look, from the top menu click on Image - Other - Hot Wax Coating
If your texture is all
black check to make sure the Color Palette is set to a fairly light colour, too
dark - black texture
By now you should have
your 1st useable desktop wallpaper, wasn't that easy ! Have a practice with this
bit for a while ..
Making a Tile from
your Textured Desktop Wallpaper
This is
quite a tricky process to get right, you need to practise this a bit ....
Find an area
of the wallpaper which has some symetry well away from the edges and
select a square about 250 x 250
Use Paint
Shop Pro's 'Convert to Seamless Pattern' from the 'Selections' menu.
Create a new
image (800x600) and fill with the seamless image you have just created.
This may
look OK straight off, chances are it won't! Now you have to start
playing about with it
Identify the
areas of the tile which do not blend together properly - use combinations
of gaussian blur/soften/darken RGB/clone to blend the areas
together. Don't forget to sharpen up the areas you have just edited
or the finished product will look awful.
Use Plugins
to apply effects to the tile image to hide the 'joins' - Hot Wax, Plastic
Wrap are my faves (you can tell can't you ?)
After you
have finished editing, cut out a square that has been altered the same
size as the original texture and save as a new tile
Create
a new 800x 600 image again and fill with the new tile to test it, you may
have to do this several time to get it right.
Hot Tips
1.
Do use proprietry texture making programs to provide the base for your
textures, by blending these together you can create a variety of unique
textures with which you can experiment with. (See programs in my
Links)
2.
Making tiles is a lot easier with dark textures, it's a lot more difficult
to see the joins and provides better contrast with light text.
3.
When you are messing about with stuff and something looks interesting, cut
it out and save it for later - some of my best tiles have been fashioned
by mixing a few 'samples'. Experiment with anything and everything,
I've used national geographic photos !
4.
Do try your tiles in different resolutions, most common users are have
either 800x600 or 1024x768 desktops, making tiles which look like muddy
screen will not win you any hits ! Try offering in a two sizes ( I
do mine in 100x100 and 200x200)
5.
Do offer a preview page, surfers like to see what they are downloading, a
well presented page with easy previews will add your site to many peoples
favourites.
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I daren't put
this as a link in case of spammers!