The title of this paper follows a classic structure - a technical main title followed by a descriptive subtitle, so everyone understands exactly what it does. The best part is it 'just works', even on photos you would expect to break it. A texture artist can avoid the tedious and time consuming activity of preparing tileable textures and focus on actually texturing.

To explain the technical part of the title, the 'obvious' solution to making tileable textures is to run a texture synthesis algorithm (in this case PatchMatch) with the constraints wrapping around the edges, so the output tiles. Sometimes this works, but more often than not it fails. This is because humans are really good at spotting the odd one out. This is where 'stationarization' comes in - a stationary detail is one repeated throughout a texture. A non-stationary detail is the odd one out that humans notice. So this algorithm adjusts the texture synthesis to avoid including non-stationary details. And that just works!

During production we didn't create a video, as Joep made this great online supplementary results navigator, so we decided to make up for it with a particularly crazy spotlight video:


(Extended edition. Original had to be 30 seconds long, so this adds back the stuff we had to drop, plus includes a title slide.)

Stuart came up with the initial storyboard, and Joep was our 'actor', whilst I did all the VFX and 3D graphics. Probably went too far, but they were my weekends and I like a good dose of absurdity:-)

You may find everything on the project page, but here is the paper:

"Texture Stationarization: Turning Photos into Tileable Textures." by Joep Moritz, Stuart James, Tom S. F. Haines, Tobias Ritschel & Tim Weyrich. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 36(2), 2017 (if 75 megabytes is too much there is also a low resolution version)

You can also download the supplementary material, though I would strongly recommend browsing it online instead.