PTE tutorial: Combining Textures This little tutorial shows you how you can get from a small collection of ressource textures a big variety of textures by combining different types of source textures. The used 2D techniques are very simple, but the work concept will boost your texture pool for each project considerably. On the left is the kind of texture we are going to make. You might want to download the tutorial.zip files containing all image files used in the tutorial and quite some more files for you to play around. All the files are from my Primus Textures Editions products at RMP and you are welcome to use the files in the tutorial.zip in any project you like Royalty Free. As you can see in the rendered image below we create tilable textures that are best suited for architectural things like: doors, floors, ceilings and stuff like that.

Let us begin now! 1. Open frame_01.jpg from the tutorial.zip in the 2D image editor you your choice. The frame object is tilable and as you can see the interiour is black. We first have to get rid of the black interiour and then we can fill the interiour with whatever we like. By doing that we get different offspring sharing all the tileable frame so that we can arrange each offspring to a larger composition isf we want 2. Choose the magic wand tool or whatever your 2D app calls the colour selection tool and select the black interiour of the frame. 3. Now expand the selection 1-2 pixels to get rid of the last black pixels and invert the selection afterwards. Now the frame is selected and you can copy the frame to a new layer. Hide now the old layer and you should now have something looking like the image below. Save now the file in a layer supporting format, because this will be our template for our offspring textures. 4. Now we are going to fill the interiour of the frame with whatever we like. The filling does not need to be a seamless texture it only has to fit the frame. We can fill the interiour with three different texture styles: a. simple or natural pattern (like a stone simple stone or metal texture in our case) b. ornamental or figural pattern c. composition (simple pattern + cut out texture object ) 5. First we create a combined texture with a figural pattern filling. Open filling_fig_1.jpg. 6. Copy the filling to a new layer in our template file and scale it down to the size of the inner frame and move it to fit the frame. In our case the filling looks better on top of our frame while most simple pattern can be put under the frame without exact scaling. 7. Now we have to do some colour and tone correction and if you like you can give the filling a shadow to all sides so that it blends better with the underlying frame. That`s all - you are finished with your first offspring!

Now you can start building up your textures to more and more complex compositions It is a time saving way to create variation of tiles and escape the dulness of a ever repeating single tile. By the way if you are in need of frames, texture objects, simple and ornament pattern why dont you have a look at my store at RMP. Hope you enjoyed the little tutorial. Below are some renders of simple compositions