Tom Arah shows you the best way to bring some texture into your design work.

Long-term readers will know that I am a big fan and keen advocate of the use of seamless bitmap textures. Such textures play an essential role in the production of 3D work, as we saw again last month, but they can also prove just as useful within 2D bitmap and vector environments...

The transformation that applying a simple bitmap tile can achieve is extraordinary, instantly bringing an image to creative life. For maximum impact from minimal effort, nothing comes close – so long as you have the right tile ready to apply.
But this is the problem. You can build up a library of naturalistic and abstract bitmaps downloaded from the web and accumulated from the sample sets provided with creative applications (the true texture fan will download the free trials of programs such as Piranesi, SketchUp and Real-Draw Pro for this reason alone), but however big your collection you can never have enough. Say you want to apply a wood texture to a rectangular plane to create a realistic floor. If you’re very lucky you might have the perfect tile ready to go but, more often than not, it will be in the ball park but not quite right for the image in hand.
It might just be a question of tweaking the colours, which can be done in a bitmap editor, but there’s more to a realistic wood texture than its colour: different species of tree are defined by their varying grains, knots, density and so on and, if you’re talking about floor boards or parquet, there’s the length, width, depth, colour and placement of planks to take into account too. Worse, you might have the perfect image but its resolution is fixed and so might not be up to the job in hand. If you need to use it beyond its built-in resolution – close to the camera in a 3D image or when outputting a large 2D print – instead of making the image by bringing it to believable life, the soft or pixelated texture lets the image down and reveals its artificiality.

With generated textures you can create any number of variations at any resolution.

Perhaps surprisingly, the solution is to create your tiles yourself as that way you can set the desired resolution from the start and take complete control of the end result. So how can you go about creating a bitmap texture? This is a subject I looked at some time ago (see rw118) when I uncovered two real gems. As both applications have developed a great deal since and now offer even more functionality and value, including some extraordinary free power, it’s well-worth giving them a second look.