Tileable Texture
Repeats without visible seams
Also known as: Seamless texture · Tiling texture · Repeating texture · Tileable material
Definition
A tileable texture is an image whose opposite edges match, so it can repeat across a surface in a grid with no visible seam. Tileable textures cover large areas such as floors, walls, ground and fabric with one small image, which saves memory and texture space. The challenge is repetition: an obvious pattern, bright spot or unique mark shows up like a stamp as the texture tiles.
In production
Author them in Substance Designer or with the tiling tools in Substance Painter and Photoshop, and avoid strong unique features in the image. To hide repetition, mix several scales of the same texture, blend in a large low-frequency noise mask or use anti-tiling in the material. Use power-of-two sizes and keep texel density consistent with the rest of the scene so the surface does not look stretched or oversharp next to other assets.
Tools that use Tileable Texture
See also
Anti-Tiling
Hide repetition in tileable textures
Trim Sheet
Reusable horizontal strips of detail
Texel Density
Texture-to-surface ratio
Triplanar Mapping
UV-free projection from three axes
Substance Graph
Procedural material authoring in Substance Designer
Texture Atlas
Multiple assets, one texture
Substance Designer Texture Not Tiling
Visible seams when the material repeats
Tile Sampler
Designer node that scatters patterns
Seamless Texture in Photoshop
Make an image tile without visible seams
UV Panning
Scrolling a texture over time
Flow Map
Texture that tells a surface which way to flow