Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Reviews.

I recently discovered Spiral Graphics‘ Genetica, a powerful editor of seamless textures, animated textures, and HDRI environment maps available on Windows XP and above.

While you can see the huge list of features at this page and a lot of case studies here, I am publishing a tutorial about the creation of a seamless texture from a normal photo.

Let’s say you are making a top-down shoot’em up and you need a seamless texture of a forest to have your helicopter fly over it and blast some enemies, and you don’t want to start looking in an endless list of sites selling royalty free textues, you can use Genetica to have your own, unique seamless texture.

So here we go:

Like in every software you are used, select File->New…

From Library->Advanced select Synthesis and drag it in the Empty box in the centre of your document

You just created what Genetica calls “node”, which is something between a Photoshop layer and a batch action. Click Texture->Edit to define the texture

In the Edit tab click Select Image to import your photo

At this time, you can choose your photo from a series of presets offered by Genetica or import your own. We decided to import our own photo, so in Import tab we select Import Image.

And this is the image we are going to import. I’ve downloaded it from freewallpapers.pro and as the name of the site suggests, it’s not a seamless texture but a wallpaper.

Anyway, once the image has been imported, click Ok and you’re ready to turn it into a seamless texture.

This is how Texture Synthesis comes into play: you can adjust picture attributes such as saturation and contrast, select the area to turn into a seamless texture, which can have any shape. In this specific case, it’s an irregular polygon.

On the left panel, you can see the preview of the final seamless texture.

Once you are satisfied, press Ok

And finally your seamless texture is ready to be exported. You can export and save it clicking on the toolbar icons, or save the nodes in the proprietary format, just like when you save a PhotoShop file as a PSD.

And this is what I got, look at my 512×512 seamless forest texture:

With Genetica you can make any kind of graphic effect in the easy way, just like the seamless texture I just showed you.

I am using it in a couple of projects so I am going to talk about it soon.

You can download the demo and evaluate the software, then buy for a price starting from $149, but using FERONATO as discount code you will get it with a 30% OFF.