Making textures from nothing with Paint by Zaweba's render filters
Clouds, lighting effects, flames, Perlin noise, Voronoi, mazes and fractals: the render filters in Paint by Zaweba create new pictures from scratch.
Not every filter works on an existing picture. The Render filters in Paint by Zaweba make new content: skies, textures, patterns, lighting and even mazes and fractals. They are handy whenever you need a background, a texture for a 3D model, a placeholder for a design or simply something interesting to paint over.
Many of them use the active gradient for their colours, so picking a gradient first is a quick way to set the mood.
Clouds and natural textures
Clouds fills the layer with soft, cloudy noise. In blues and whites you have a passable sky; in greys and you have a texture for smoke, concrete or a grungy overlay. Difference Clouds blends new clouds with what is already there, and running it several times builds up marbled, veiny patterns. Fibres creates stringy, wood-grain or fabric-like streaks. Flames and trees draw fire and simple trees directly.
Lighting Effects
Lighting Effects shines up to three lights on the picture. You can set gloss and how metallic the surface looks, and choose a bump channel so the brightness of part of the image acts as relief. Light raking across a texture with a bump channel gives depth to a stone wall, a paper surface or embossed text. A single soft light in one corner can also add atmosphere to a flat product shot.
Beyond lighting, the picture and decorative frame renders add borders around a photo. They are a quick finishing touch for prints, greetings cards and social posts.
Noise and patterns for designers
Perlin, Simplex and Cell noise are the classic procedural noises used in games and 3D. Perlin and Simplex give smooth organic variation, good for terrain, clouds and displacement maps. Cell noise gives a pattern of cells, like scales, cracked mud or foam. Voronoi produces a similar cellular pattern with clean edges, useful for stained glass and abstract backgrounds. Plasma creates colourful swirls of noise.
Checkerboard, Grid, Stripes, Spiral and Sunburst make the simple geometric backgrounds that turn up in posters, retro designs and transparency previews. Sunburst with a two-colour gradient is the classic comic book or sale poster background.
Procedural Texture ties many of these ideas together as a texture generator, and Star Shine adds a bright star sparkle.
Fractals and fun
Mandelbrot and Julia draw the famous mathematical fractals, and Fractal Explorer lets you roam them. IFS Flame creates the swirling, glowing shapes known as fractal flames. Maze draws a maze, a nice touch for children's activity sheets and puzzle posters. Jigsaw overlays jigsaw piece lines on a picture, so a photo can look like a puzzle.
Using render filters well
Render onto a new, empty layer, not over your photo, so you can blend, mask and scale the result separately. Then use blend modes to combine: Clouds in Overlay mode adds a soft mottled light to a flat background; Cell noise in Multiply gives a cracked, aged surface.
Set your colours before rendering. Since many of these filters take their colours from the active gradient, a few seconds choosing colours saves recolouring afterwards.
Render at the final size. Noise patterns enlarged later lose their crispness, so make the layer the size you need first.
Mistakes to avoid with render filters
Large renders of complex fractals can take a while, so try settings on a smaller document first, and remember Cancel stops a filter within about a second. Generated textures can look obviously synthetic if used at full strength, so lower the layer opacity or mix two textures for a more natural result.
From quick backgrounds to tileable textures, the Render filters make Paint by Zaweba useful even when you are starting from a blank canvas.
