ManuCornet.net

Google

The Texturize plugin for GIMP

NEW : Texturize 2.0 (with tileable textures) released !


Welcome to the Texturize plugin webpage. This plugin works with the GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program). Its purpose is to generate large textures from a small sample. It can also generate tileable textures.

What is the texturize plugin ?

What is it good for ?

Imagine that you have an image with a small sample of a texture, like a few strawberries (out of a plate full of them), a few square inches of grass (from a large grassy field), or a few dozens of your cat's hairs (your cat really has more than that). If you want to generate a larger texture with this small image, you could just copy-paste it, and put the copies (or "patches") one next to another, but that wouldn't produce a very good result, since the right (or top) part of the image usually doesn't correspond to its left (or bottom) part, when two copies of the image are assembled.



A few images are indeed designed to be copy-pasted one next to another and still look natural, but the result is usually periodic and very monotonous (it looks like wallpaper -- the one on your walls, not the one on your computer desktop!).

The Texturize plugin allows you to get all the strawberries, the whole grass field, or your whole cat (well, it doesn't guess you cat's shape, but you can at least get a lot of his hairs!). Moreover, Texturize lets you actually create tileable textures (which is great for game design). Have a look at the examples section to see what it looks like.

A program named "The GIMP" ? Is that a joke ?

It sure isn't! GIMP stands for "GNU Image Manipulation Program". You probably already know Photoshop, the leader image program by Adobe. Well, GIMP does pretty much the same as Photoshop (if you are a Photoshop power user, you'll find that it still lacks some functions, though). With a small difference: Photoshop costs several hundreds of dollars, whereas GIMP costs absolutely nothing (it is "open source" software, just like Firefox, Linux, or OpenOffice.org). You can download it for free from www.gimp.org, for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. And our plugin is designed for The GIMP.

Who wrote the plugin ?

The two authors of the first version are Emmanuel Cornet and Jean-Baptiste Rouquier, students in the "École normale supérieure" (ENS) in France. This plugin is the result of a school project in a Computer Vision class, for Renaud Keriven (teacher). However, its development continues even after the class is finished.

The Texturize plugin is based on a theoretical computer science article, called "Graphcut Textures: Image and Video Synthesis Using Graph Cuts", written by Vivek Kwatra, Arno Schödl, Irfan Essa, Greg Turk and Aaron Bobick.

We also borrowed a little part of our code (the graph cut part) from Yuri Boykov and Vladimir Kolmogorov. Here is the webpage of their article (with a link to the code).

The plugin is fully translated into French.

Download the plugin (version 2.0)

 The Texturize plugin is available under the GPL license. This, among other things, means that you can use this program free of charge, for any use (including commercial), and that you are free to distribute it to other people.

Binaries

Windows

 The Windows version of our plugin (version 2.0) is available here. Thanks to Michael Schumacher for compiling our plugin for Windows !

See here how to install it on your system.

Debian package

A Debian package (version 2.0) is available thanks to Mohammed Adnene Trojette and is extremely popular !

Mac

 Here is a binary for Intel processor (the recent Mac computers). We are not yet able to provide you with binaries for Mac OS X on powerPC. If you hknow how to compile a GIMP plugin for this system, please contact us.

Sources

You can download the Texturize 2.0 sources from here (just choose a mirror near to you).

You can still download the sources of Texturize 1.0 here.

Texturize is also hosted on SourceForge : here.

Installation

 For all systems, you should already have The GIMP installed on your computer. It seems that the plugin doesn't work with Gimp version 2.3, reports welcome. You can get The GIMP here for Windows, here for Mac OS X and here for Unix/Linux.

Windows

After downloading the Windows version of the plugin, just unzip the file and put it into your GIMP plugins directory. The plugins directory should be located at C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.2\lib\gimp\2.0\plugins (replace the beginning of this path by wherever you installed the GIMP program).

Then quit The GIMP if it was open, and launch it again to let it load the new plugin. r

Linux

Debian package

If you're using Debian or (K,X)ubuntu, just install the package gimp-texturize, with a package manager like synaptic or with the command line:
sudo apt-get install gimp-texturize .

From source

If the configure script tells you that it needs libraries that are not yet installed (the GIMP development environment for instance), install them first with your usual package manager then run ./configure again.

Mac

These instructions havn't been tested, please tell us if you try them, whether or not it worked.

Howto

How to use the plugin

Using this plugin is pretty straightforward. Once it is installed, you will find it in Gimp, from the "Filters" menu, then the "Map" category.

For your first use, try not to use too large an image (200 x 200 is a good start) and stick to the default values. Then you can ask for larger images and higher overlaps (see the next paragraph), when you know approximately how long the rendering is going to take.

You only need to set four parameters: Once these three parameters are set, just click "OK". If you asked for a large image, or a high overlap, you should go drink a coffee (it can take several minutes)!

Small tips

If you want to create really large images from a small sample, it is usually a better idea to run the Texturize plugin several times : create a middle-sized image using the plugin, then run the plugin again on this middle-sized image (you can even take more than two steps if you want a really large image, but the result might not be as natural as you could hope). See the "More tulips" and "More grass" images in the examples section.

If you can't get a great result the first time, try to run the plugin again, changing the parameters (including width and height) to get a better result.

You will need a high overlap for images that have long range structures, like "Blanket" or "Escher horses" in the examples section.

Screenshot

Contact us

 If you have any suggestions, questions, or if you would like to contribute (by translating the plugin for other languages, or by providing us with a Windows how-to or Mac OS X binary, for example), feel free to send us a message at gimp (dot) texturize (at) gmail (dot) com.

Examples

 Here are a few samples of what the Texturize plugin allows you to do.

Some of the original textures were downloaded from the Mayang website. Some other ones were downloaded from the graph cut textures article webpage. And some of them are personnal pictures.

TitleOriginalTexturized
Strawberries
Carpet
Fur
Rice
Pineapple
Greek text (well, it doesn't mean anything anyway !)
Bricks
Grapes
Shiny tiles
Seashells
Etna
Grass
Snow
Earth
Tulips
More tulips
Leaves
Chive
Escher horses
Nuts
Penguins
Tomatoes
Keyboard (how'd you like that to write your next email ?)
Blanket
More grass
Marbles
Pebbles
Pigeons (now you'll really want to come to Paris to visit us !)

Tileable examples

 Here are a few examples of what you can get if you check the "Tileable" box.

TitleOriginalTexturized & tileableTiled
Earth (tiled : 6 copies)
Big leaves (tiled : 6 copies)
Greek (tiled : 6 copies)

Known limitations (work to do for next versions)
TitleOriginalTexturized
Clouds
Drops
Wood