May 2012 Tutorial - Create Seamless Patterns in Xara Designer Pro X

[PhilM]

Thanks Gary! I realise they're not artistically very good but I hope people find the ideas useful.

Here are a few tips that I've found while using the auto-tiler:
* You only need three layers at most for any design. The layers are only there to ensure the overlaps between shapes at the edges of the tile are correct and so if you arrange all your bottom left overlaps to be on Layer 1 and top right overlaps on Layer 2 it will work. Shapes in the middle of the tile can be on either layer. Layer 0 is for a simple repeating background. (When shapes don't overlap you don't even need three layers.)
* When you're starting a new design use "Open live copy" to open the live copies and delete the contents and use outline mode so that you can see the background square and avoid deleting it.
* It doesn't matter exactly where you position your shapes when you're using "Open live copy" to start a design. Just put something rough down in roughly the right place and then you can do the fine editing in the main document using select-inside, where you can see the tiling.
* Avoid obvious square repeating by using the square backround shape only as a guide, don't join things along the edges of the square. You can use snapping in the main document to join parts of one tile to the next.
* You can safely change the pixel size of the final tile by altering the dpi in Create Bitmap Copy. It seems that any size tiles OK but it's probably best to stick to simple factors of 96 dpi. So 48dpi will give you a 256*256 tile, for example.

Phil

[angelize]

Here's one more from me. I painted the flower using the shapebuilder then grouped it and gave it a simple circular transparency. Arranged on a pale lavender background.



softly floral.zip

[gardenofdaisies]

Thanks SO much for this tutorial!! I've been on a quest to find the best way to make perfect repeats and it fell into my lap today. You rock!

[Gare]

You're quite welcome, and I'm happy to see that a member can put the steps to use in the embroidery field!

@Stygg—

Here's a layer of grime you can add to your tiles. It's seamless, and sort of clumpish.



My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

I'm going to experiment with your clumpy noise Gary, I think it might be just dandy for using as a fill with the shape builder and a semi transparent stroke to actually paint on grungey stains. Thanks

[angelize]

Here is my experiment, it worked quite well. What I did after creating my basic parchment paper was to import the clumpy noise tile and I adjusted the contrast and brightness a bit to give my stains a bit more defintion, then I used the colour erase/select tool to remove most of the lighter colour and I made a bitmap copy. Next I drew a stroke with the shape builder ( no need to worry about settings for this stroke but a large nib will give you a nice big shape to work with) and I filled this stoke with the new bit map copy. Then I made sure nothing was selected and went to the transparency tool and set a transparency around 65 - 70%. Finally I went back to the shape builder selected a large nib and set the softness fairly high and because the last stroke was filled with the bitmap the shape builder continues to fill each stroke with this fill until you change it. Note: you must have GNOMRA enabled for this to work. You can make sure no strokes are selected and go back to the transparency tool and set it to a lower setting and add a few darker stains if you wish.

What I would really like is to be able to set the transparency for the shape builder from the SB info bar, and the same for the eraser.

[stygg2003]

Thanks for the clumpy noise Gary, Francis found good use for it right away, good effect.

Stygg

[Christine Farrelly]

Just to prove that they don't have to be square.



Hexagon.xar

Christine

[Gare]

These noise layers are getting to be tiles of their own! I thought I'd offer something that's noisy, but also has an organic appearance to it. Put it on top of your design at partial opacity, Stained Glass blending mode might work well.



My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

This was approximately the linoleum tile pattern ni our kitchen when we forst bought our house.

A quick trip to Home Depot and a hundred bucks and an exhausting afternoon corrected this grievous sin against aesthetics.



My Best,

Gary