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Tools to generate textures

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fhstoica:
Hi,

I have some tools that can be used to generate textures like the ones attached. I made a sample using a color map with only 3 colors, Red, Green and Blue, the same sample on grayscale only, and the normalmap, which I simply generated with the GIMP plug-in.

The colors can be changed, more can be added, the roughness can be increased or decreased. The attachments are just a sample of what can be done. Since the texture is generated using a Fast Fourier Transform, the opposite edges of the images match, and they can be easily tiled.

If anyone is interested please let me know and I will make the tools available to everybody.

krilain:
Hello, are you the author of the gimp plug-in that produces those effects?

fhstoica:
No way, I am not at the point of writing GIMP plug-ins.

Only the last image, the normal map, I generated from the grayscale image using the Normalmap GIMP plugin. I simply installed the plugin on my Linux distro using Synaptic.

I believe you can contact the original author at this URL:  http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/

I generated the images using a Fourier Transform of a 2D array of random numbers (filtering out the high-frequency noise), and plotted the resulting surface (seen from above) using POV-RAY.

krilain:
Ok, thanks for the answer. It is not I wanted to contact the author of the plug'in at all. It was to know until what point you can control your texture production process in order to ask you to produce a wider set of samples with no hand working, which would be long I think.

fhstoica:
This week I am a bit tied up with some work, but I will post the tools. Basically you need GSL (the GNU Scientific Library) for the FFT and then you will need POV-RAY. The 2D FFT code (GSL offers only 1D FFT if I remember correctly) is written in C++ and the code for generating the POV-RAY script is written in Python.

Basically you can specify a few Fourier modes by hand (or let Python generate them for you as random numbers), so it takes very little time to generate the textures you see. The color and the grayscale ones take about 5 seconds to generate on my machine (Athlon II X4, 3GHz).  You have very granular control over each step.

The normalmap requires hand work in GIMP.

I will post a short how-to on this forum, but I will write a more detailed document on what each script/program does. Will also generate more samples, and they require no hand work, just to launch a script from the command line.

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