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Step 12 - Surveying Our Land
Well, the dirt isn't the coarsest  in the world, but I still I wouldn't want to walk across it with my bare feet!   Overlaying the two textures we have created so far gives us the following scene:

Step 13: By now the tutorial is reaching it's end. You should already have a good idea how the Pattern Maker works by creating two new high-quality textures. But, since we've started making a road, let's finish it in great style.

Create a new document 256px*256px in size. Paste in the grass texture and, above it in a new layer, the dirt texture. Copy & Paste another dirt texture layer above and hide it. We're going to reproduce the transitions between dirt and grass, starting with the left hand side of the road.   So, without further hesitation, pick up the Eraser Tool, and choose a large-diameter spray-like brush. Set the Opacity between 90-100% and gently clean up the left side edges.

Step 14: Lower the brush size and set the Opacity to 30-40%. You should now attempt to smooth the transition between the two textures, giving us a final result like the image on the left.

Step 15: Now here comes the tricky part: How can you know the upper/lower borders will merge properly? You can, of course use brute-force, changing the images slightly every time before testing in your 3D Editor - but that's a very tedious solution to the issue. Instead, behold the miracle of Filters > Other > Offset! Just in case you've never heard of this filter before, it  allows you to offset an image on the X & Y axes. It's a very important filter, and makes our life much easier. As a limitation, though, it can only be used on one layer per time, meaning that you'll have to run it on both layers independently making sure the settings are identical. With this in mind, run the filter with a Horizontal value of 0, and a Vertical value of 150.  Make sure you have  "Wrap Around" selected, and click OK. Do this for both layers.

Step 16 - Its a Road!
With practice, you will not have a problem with jagged edges. If you do, just use Clone-Stamp and the Eraser to make them vanish. Then, using the Offset filter again with a vertical value of -150, move your scenery back to its original positions. Save your image, hide the dirt layer, and unhide the second hidden dirt layer we made in step 13.

Repeat steps 13 to 15, but with the right hand side of the image. You can, of course, just replicate the left-hand path edge, but this would add reality-killing symmetry, which is definitely discouraged.  And that's it - You're done! You should ideally play around with the brightness, contrast, and hue of your final image to reflect nature more accurately, but I'll leave that to you!

Epilogue: This process is used in many professional areas, and is a very valuable technique. The results are top-end and, if I used a bigger resolution for the grass, I'm very sure it would end up better than the grass textures I've seen in some TOP MMORPGs recently (not mentioning any names, of course ;).

One thing you must keep in mind is your gaming engine of choice. I've covered how to make the transitions between tiles, but this is a rather obsolete technique as many of the newer map-makers do this automatically for you. Nevertheless, its still a valuable skill to learn for many other graphical tasks. One example of a game that uses the tile system best is Ragnarok Online.  The grass is made up of hundreds of mini-tiles!   Whilst they may not blend together perfectly all the time the final result is still, in my opinion, visually impressive and extremely difficult to imitate.

Last but not least, I used 256px*256px textures for my examples above, but I highly recommend you to always work with 512*512, or, if possible, even 1024*1024.  Of course, if you are working on a game that uses small tiles, you will stick with 32*32, 64*64, etc. But since we're in the age of uber-expensive video cards, you really should train with the highest resolutions possible.  Well, that's it. I hope this tutorial was useful to you. Don't forget to train and develop your own methods - Pattern making isn't as simple as loading a plug-in after all!

yes it is very well illustrated......it needs a proper steps for following these...and a patience

i hve also no idea....might be 2nd one

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Very nice, detailed, and well-illustrated tut. Thanks.

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is this tutorial about isometric boards? i mean with lined of 2 pixels

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