Pattern Generator

Seven generators on one pipeline

Most pattern tools hand you a texture and let you scale it. This is a generator: the pattern is computed for your image, at your resolution, every time you change a control. Seven of them share one pipeline, so everything below applies to all of them.

Noise builds a field and cuts it into shapes. Camo stamps a shape set across the frame the way real disruptive-pattern camouflage is drawn. Grid lays down a lattice — square, hex, triangle, graph, dots, crosses or hatch. Voronoi divides the frame into cells around scattered seed points, each cell owning the area closest to its own seed. Quadtree subdivides recursively, splitting a square into four wherever there is more going on, so the pattern gets finer exactly where the picture gets busier. Flow traces strokes along a direction field. Contour draws the lines you would get by slicing the image at fixed heights, like a topographic map.

Each one can Fill its shapes or Stroke their edges. Stroke is a real line at a real width rather than a shape with its middle knocked out, which is why it stays clean at small scales instead of breaking into speckle.

It reads the photograph

This is the part that separates it from a pattern overlay, and it is the same idea the rest of V3KTR is built on: the picture is not a flat sheet of pixels, so the pattern should not be laid on it like one.

Adapt decides what drives the scale of each cell or stamp. Off keeps them even, which is the honest baseline and sometimes the right answer. Tone sizes them by brightness. Depth sizes them by how far away that part of the scene is, so the pattern crowds up close and opens out into the distance — the single control that makes the result sit in the image rather than on it. Detail sizes them by how much fine structure is there, which concentrates the pattern on the busy parts and lets flat areas breathe.

Follow is separate and does something different: it decides where the pattern's colour comes from. Off keeps the pattern's own palette — twenty presets, from flat single colours through to five-stop woodland and desert ramps. Tone takes the colour from the picture's brightness instead, Depth from its distance. Between them, Size From and Follow are why two runs of the same generator on two different photographs do not look like the same wallpaper twice.

Camouflage, and your own shape in it

Camo ships five shape sets. Blob is the soft, organic, woodland kind. Tech is the hard-edged geometric kind. Tiger is the narrow striped kind. V3KTR is the house set. Custom is the interesting one: upload your own shape — a logo, a mark, a silhouette — and it becomes the stamp the pattern is built from.

Any of the five can be pixelated into digital camo, the blocky style that replaced painted patterns on most modern uniforms, and the pixelation applies identically to a custom upload — including one that is being resized by depth.

Seamless tiling, and what it costs you

Four of the generators — Noise, Camo, Grid and Voronoi — can be made seamless, wrapping to an integer period so the frame meets itself at the edges and can be repeated as a texture.

It is offered on those four only, and that restriction is deliberate rather than unfinished. A pattern that tiles almost everywhere is worse than one that does not tile at all, because a seam that shows up somewhere unpredictable is harder to work around than a seam you know is there.

There is a real trade in it, and it is worth stating plainly: turning Seamless on turns the image-reading off. A photograph does not tile, so anything sized from the picture cannot tile either. Seamless gives you a repeatable texture; Size From gives you a pattern that belongs to one particular image. You get one or the other, not both.

The pattern can become geometry

Height is the control that stops this being a surface treatment. Turn it up and the pattern's bands are written into the depth the app is carrying for your image — so every depth-aware effect stacked above it stops seeing a photograph and starts seeing a landscape with your pattern built into it.

In Fill mode each band becomes a plateau; in Stroke mode the strokes become ridges. Put Relight above it and the plate edges catch light and cast shading breaks, as though the pattern had been cut out of card and lit from the side. Put Z-Depth above it and you can see what happened: the bands read as terraces in the false-colour depth.

It costs nothing until you use it — the pass only runs when Height is above zero and something above it actually reads depth.

It also works as a mask

Pattern is available as a mask source on every layer, not just as an effect in its own right. So the pattern does not have to be the thing you see — it can be the thing that decides where something else shows through.

Mask a heavy glitch behind a hex lattice and the glitch only survives inside the cells. Mask a colour grade behind depth-sized camo and the grade lands on the near shapes and leaves the distance alone. As a mask it only needs to answer where, so it exposes a reduced set of controls rather than the full panel.

When you'd reach for it

When you want to add something to the picture rather than treat what is already there. Every other effect in the app takes your pixels and does something to them; this one generates new structure and uses your pixels to decide what that structure should look like.

It is the natural choice for camouflage and technical-graphic work, for turning a logo into a repeating field, and for building a texture that has to sit convincingly in a photographed scene rather than float on top of it. It is also the heaviest effect in the app: if the preview drops resolution while you are working, that is the render governor protecting you, and it will sharpen back up when you stop changing things.

Every option, from the app

Generated from the registry the app publishes, so this list is whatever the current build actually ships — not a copy of it.

Mode

NoiseCamoGridVoronoiQuadtreeFlowContour

Shape

BlobTechTigerV3KTRCustom

Lattice

SquareHexTriangleGraphDotsCrossesHatch

Render

FillStroke

Adapt

OffToneDepthDetail

Adapt Mode

DensitySize

Follow

OffToneDepth

Interpolation

RGBOKLCH

Related effects

• Reaction–DiffusionA Gray–Scott reaction–diffusion simulation seeded by your image, with curated feed/kill presets for spots, stripes, worms, mitosis, coral and chaos.
• Physarum Slime MouldThe Jones slime-mould model run for real — a quarter of a million agents sense, turn, move and deposit until a transport network grows out of your photograph, because the picture is the food map.
• MetaballDepth points scattered into a volumetric density field and raymarched as an isosurface — blobs that genuinely fuse where they meet, with capsule connectors, cast shadows and ambient occlusion.

Open the app to try it; the free effects work with no signup. Open V3KTR · all the FX · how it works