SeamlessGAN: Self-Supervised Synthesis of Tileable Texture Maps

Real-time graphics applications require high-quality textured materials to convey realism in virtual environments. Generating these textures is challenging as they need to be visually realistic, seamlessly tileable, and have a small impact on the memory consumption of the application. For this reason, they are often created manually by skilled artists. In this work, we present
SeamlessGAN
, a method capable of automatically generating tileable texture maps from a single input exemplar. In contrast to most existing methods, focused solely on solving the synthesis problem, our work tackles both problems,
synthesis
and
tileability
, simultaneously. Our key idea is to realize that tiling a latent space within a generative network trained using adversarial expansion techniques produces outputs with continuity at the seam intersection that can then be turned into tileable images by cropping the central area. Since not every value of the latent space is valid to produce high-quality outputs, we leverage the discriminator as a perceptual error metric capable of identifying artifact-free textures during a sampling process. Further, in contrast to previous work on deep texture synthesis, our model is designed and optimized to work with multi-layered texture representations, enabling textures composed of multiple maps such as albedo, normals, etc. We extensively test our design choices for the network architecture, loss function, and sampling parameters. We show qualitatively and quantitatively that our approach outperforms previous methods and works for textures of different types.