TextureMill is a professional graphic design tool that allows the creation of seamless textures for web pages, multimedia, 3D rendering, and desktop patterns. The user can select from 20 unique patterns, change the look with different surface treatments, colorize the image in real-time with a multi-color selector, preview the image as a background in a sample web page, then save the image in PICT or GIF file format.
TextureMill uses high quality "wrapping" filters and image processing to ensure perfectly seamless tiles.
The 20 base patterns, with added surface treatments (varying degrees of noise, blur, gain, emboss, invert, plus the powerful iterate feature) allows the creation of over 400 unique patterns!
How to Register
TextureMill is shareware. When you register TextureMill, you will receive 80 additional patterns for a total of one hundred:
20 synthetic patterns
20 wood patterns
20 rock patterns
20 paper and cloth patterns
20 industrial patterns.
All 100 base patterns can be customized with surface treatments and colorization to create over 2,000 unique variations!
To register send US$20 to:
Deep Devices
P.O. Box 620038
Newton Lower Falls, MA 02162
Be sure to include an e-mail or postal address when you register.
If you are a CompuServe member, then you can register on-line. Go SWREG and search for TextureMill. Follow the instructions from there.
Using TextureMill
After launching TextureMill, click the mouse or hit any key to continue through the splash screen.
TextureMill has four main screens for creating new textures: Pattern, Surface, Colorize, and Preview. There are four navigation buttons at the top of the window. You can use these buttons to take you to any screen at any time. There is also a TextureMill menu with Pattern, Surface, Colorize, and Preview items that will take you to the corresponding screen.
Pattern Screen
The Pattern screen presents a pattern grid and a preview window. The pattern grid is a 5 x 4 array of small icons that represent the 20 available patterns. The preview window displays the current texture.
Click any of the 20 patterns in the grid to select it. When you do, the pattern will appear full screen in the preview window. The name of the pattern will appear under the preview window for reference.
Note: The preview window displays the effects of all four screens. So as you select different patterns they will appear with surface treatments and colorization.
Surface Screen
The surface screen allows you change the look of the texture by applying various surface treatments. You can see the result of the treatments in the preview window.
The first three treatments, noise, blur, and gain, can be applied by varying degrees from 0 through 100 using the sliders. For all three, 0 means off and 50 is the default setting.
• Noise - adds uniform random noise to the texture. It tends to make the texture look rough and gritty.
• Blur - softens the texture. This makes the texture look as if it is out of focus.
• Gain - stretches the contrast of the texture. At the extreme setting, 100, the texture uses only two colors.
The iterate button allows you to apply treatments repeatedly up to four times. The default is one time. This has many uses. For example, you can do an extreme blur by setting noise to 0, blur to 100, gain to 0 and iterate to 4.
Note: Iterate will seem to do nothing if noise, blur, and gain are set to zero.
The next two treatments, emboss and invert, are either on or off, off being the default.
• Emboss - makes the texture look like a bumpy surface, with the light coming from the upper left.
• Invert - inverts luminance. This makes the texture look like a negative image.
Colorize Screen
The Colorize screen allows you to add color to your texture. You can choose different colors for highlight, midtone, and shadow.
There are four sections in the Colorize screen, color enable switches, the color selector, the contrast/brightness sliders, and the preview window.
The three color enable switches are labeled highlight, midtone, and shadow and appear to the left of their color swatches. By default, all three color enable switches are turned on and the highlight, midtone and shadow colors are set to a light shade of blue. You can turn the colors off and on by toggling the enable switches. When an enable switch is turned off, the color swatch turns black and a gray color is used. Clicking on the color swatch for one of the colors brings up the Mac color picker.
The color selector shows a view of hue (left to right) and saturation (top to bottom). When a color is enabled, you will see a round color point in the selector indicating that color's hue and saturation. If all three colors are enabled, you will see three color points in the selector. The highlight color point appears lighter than the midtone point and the shadow point is darker. As you adjust the three color points by dragging them around in the selector, the preview window will update in real-time.
The contrast slider, with a default of 50, increases or decreases the strength of the pattern in the texture. The brightness slider, which also defaults to 50, makes the texture appear lighter or darker.
Hint: For black text, set the contrast to around 20 and the brightness up to 80. For white text, keep the contrast at 20 and bring the brightness down to around 20.
Preview Screen
The Preview screen shows a sample web page so you can see how your texture looks in actual use. There is a text color box that shows the current text color. You can change the text color by clicking in the box to bring up the Mac color picker.
The brightness and contrast sliders from the Colorize screen are accessible at the bottom of the Preview screen for convenience.
Hint: Use the Contrast and Brightness sliders in the Preview screen to adjust the legibility of the text.
Saving Textures
You can save your texture at any time by selecting either Save as PICT or Save as GIF from the file menu. Both menu picks will bring up the file save dialog box.
Use the GIF file format if you want to add a background texture to your web page. Use the PICT file format if you are using TextureMill in conjunction with another Mac application.
Adding a Background to Your Web Page
It's easy to use textures generated in TextureMill as web page backgrounds. If you are using a WYSIWYG editor then follow the app's instructions for adding a background image. If you are using a text editor then do the following:
(1) Create a new texture using TextureMill.
Make sure you use the Preview screen to check text legibility.
(2) Save the texture in GIF file format.
Don't use spaces in the file name.
Make sure that you have a ".gif" extension at the end of the file name.
Example: sample.gif
(3) Move the texture file to the folder where your web page is.
(4) Edit the web page and add the background attribute to the body tag
that references the texture file.
Example: <BODY BACKGROUND = "sample.gif">
(5) Test the page by opening it in a web browser.
Adding a Link to Deep Device's Web Page
Support TextureMill by adding a link to Deep Devices in your web page. A gif image called texture_mill.gif is included as a link graphic for web pages.
If you are using a WYSIWYG editor then follow the app's instructions for adding the texture_mill.gif image to your web page with a link to:
http://members.aol.com/deepdevice
If you are using a text editor then do the following:
(1) Move the texture_mill.gif file to where your web page is.
(2) Edit your web page and add the following lines:
<A HREF="http://members.aol.com/deepdevice">
<IMG SRC="texture_mill.gif" ALT="TextureMill"
BORDER=0 HEIGHT=31 WIDTH=88 ALIGN=CENTER></A>
(3) Test the page by opening it in a web browser.
Known Bugs
The following bugs are known to be in TextureMill v1.0
• Clicking on push button lights should toggle switch
• Clicking on Color Swatch should enable color
• Can't select lower iteration values directly
Please send any comments, questions or bug reports to:
72614.2176@compuserve.com
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