When patterning a texture on a 3D model for rendering, it becomes important to understand the concept of what it means for an image to be tileable. Essentially, if you make copies of your texture and line them up side to side as well as up and down, they should blend together without breaks or seams between them.
Here’s how to prepare images as seamless textures using Photoshop. You could probably use the open source “Gimp” program as well with this technique.
1- Make a new image at a square resolution such as 1024×1024 72dpi and crop any photo into this aspect ratio.
2- Use Filter>Other>Offset and offset the image in both directions at half its width and height (512×512).
3- Use the Clone Stamp tool to blend out the seams sampling appropriate areas from within the image as you work.
4- Scale the image to 50% its size and position a few copies side by side to check your work.
That’s it! The rest is time and patience… I only spent ten minutes on this sample and it’s admittedly so so, but I don’t use many cheetah patterns anyways.
