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

[Antspants]

Sorry Gary I should have said, yes of course anything you see fit. The butterfly one looks quite nice (if I may boldly suggest prehaps slightly 'girly' oh how sexist!) as a background to a web page. As with both of these the vectors have been done from scratch so no problems with ownership etc.

Here are a couple more I did yesterday but probably not suitable (and not that good!):



I did the 'bertie' vector from scrat but probably breaching a load of stuff with 'Bassets'





Was meant to be a sort of 'Mods' target but didn't get the effect right!

[Antspants]

balls_3d.xar


One more, old TUT from Xhris on using bump map live effect to create a slight 3d look for spheres. Made a bitmap of one and just adjusted the contone to suit. Bit tricky but all lines up and does look quite bold. Think this one would be an 'aquired taste' and won't be to everyones liking!.

[guyke]

I just thought I could give it a try with some bubbles.

Seamless bubbles.xar

[stygg2003]

I just thought I could give it a try with some bubbles.

Seamless bubbles.xar

Well your try turned out really good guyke

Stygg

[stygg2003]

Just made a seamless tile but this time with the rectangle turned on to its corner so to speak, made the bitmap alpha, got a good effect, and can anyone tell me why when I try to add noise to a rectangle and create a bitmap, it shows all the lines when repeating tile is selected ?

Stygg.

[Gare]

Hi Stygg—

Noise by its very nature won't tile seamlessly, because there's a randomness, an unpredictability to noise, whereas a perfectly tiling pattern has completely predictable elements. IOW, you have control over your tile's elements, you have none with noise.

That's not to say there's no such thing as seamless tiling noise; see and use the attached png in your work. You just have to define your tile size as 512 × 512 pixels. What I did was render a piece of noise, and then offset it so see any edgework, and when the edges were located at the center of the tile, I cloned the edges away.

Also, fractal noise (they should be simply called "fractals") come in two kinds, depending on the math used to create them. There are terminating, and non-terminating fractal graphics. Not to promote Photoshop on this forum, but the Filters>Render>Clouds uses a self-terminating fractal recipe that will tile perfectly if you define a file that's 256 square, or a multiple of 256 pixels.

@Phil—on my wish list would be fractal recipes in addition to what we have now. I'm not certain all of these names mean anything, or if they are all classic fractal patterns, but they do self-terminate, and I copied the names out of Cinema 4D. And I'm figuring MAXON is a Germany company, and MAGIX is a Germany company, so perhaps the names mean something:

Box Noise
Cell Noise
Dents
Displaced Turbulence
Electric
Gaseous
Hama
Luka
Naki
Nutous
Ober
Cell Voronol
Sema


Here's a few examples:



My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

I have found a trick to create textures with Xara's add noise plug in. I apply the noise filter and then clone my rectangle then hold down the minus key on the number pad and make the clone bigger. Send the clone to the back and select the original rectangle and make your tile.

Here is a tile I created using noise and embossing (yes embossing!) to create the sand. There is another trick for embossing and you need the new eraser tool to do it. It works like the noise trick except I use a large very soft eraser to erase the lines that show up when you emboss. Then create your true colour bitmap copy or export and the transparent areas of the tile that you masked out with the eraser will show the same background of the larger underneath rectangle. The rocks were done with layers of fractal transparencies.
Here is the tile and the zipped png.

Gary: if you would like to include this in the collection I give my permission.



beach rocks.zip

[stygg2003]

Thanks for the noise Png Gary, it works good. I made a rect. gave it a green fill sent it to the back of the drawing then gave the noise Png a transparency for the amount of noise I wanted to show through. I know I can't alter the actual amount of noise as the Live effects tool but this method is ok, plus you can give the Png Trans. any colour. All I want now is a folder full of various noise Png's

Stygg

[Gare]

Yeah, from your lips to Xara's ears, Stygg.

It's much, much more efficient to have a fractal generator within a program, like Fractal Clouds, than it is to generate a billion bitmaps of a result.

Let me see what I can do to generate a few different fractal noise patterns.

We got a holiday weekend here in the States.

-g

[Gare]

If you can accept that:

1.) The more visually complex the pattern, the more interesting it can be, and
2.) Filters (Live Effects, specifically 3rd party ones) can add detail, then...



I messed around with the Shape Builder and Eraser, progressively making bitmap copies and offsetting them, and then cloning over the seams, then finally I used Alien Skin's Snap Art filter, Pastels, and this required another offset and clone work.

But I think it's abstract and muted and therefore can be used on fancy book spines instead of "peacock paper" and other graphics needs.

My Best,

Gary