How to Create Textures for Interior Design

This tutorial provides an overview of how to use Poly to create textures for interior design scenes. As an example, we’ll explain how we created the wooden floor texture and the plastered wall texture for the render shown in Image 1.

Textures used in this article: Poly Wooden Floor Texture Collection and Poly Plaster Wall Texture Collection.

Image 1: This guide focuses on how to use Poly to create textures for interiors — for example, the wooden floor and the plaster wall shown here.

Step 1: Creating a Prompt

Creating the texture is the first step. To do this, navigate to the Make Patches tab on the left side of the interface. Enter a highly descriptive prompt to guide the AI to create the texture you’d like. The more descriptive the prompt is, the likelier a good result is, so be sure to add plenty of detail.

Our first texture was a wooden floor. The desired result was a texture consisting of well-defined wooden floorboards with a rustic look. The prompt we used to generate this was “photorealistic oak wooden flooring, dark colour, wooden floorboards, uniform spacing and size, highly detailed, rustic.” The patches generated by this prompt can be seen in Image 2. When you’re creating a texture with a repeating pattern, such as floor boards or tiles, it helps if you add something like “uniform spacing and size” to get a consistent look between boards.

Image 2: Patches generated for the wooden floor texture — the top right patch was selected.

The next texture we generated was the plaster wall. The desired look was a uneven plastered wall painted bright white. The prompt we used to generate this was “bright white painted wall, bumpy plaster, highly detailed, clean.” The patches this prompt generated can be seen in Image 3.

Image 3: Patches generated for the plaster wall texture — the top left patch was selected.

Step 2: Make Seamless

Now that we have our patches, the next step is to make them seamless. You do this by navigating to the Make Seamless tab and selecting a patch scale. If your texture is fairly uniform and you don’t want it to diverge too much from how it looks when it is seamless, then your best bet is to go with a patch scale of 100%. Using a scale of less than 100% will “zoom out” the texture and can introduce more variation to it. A scale greater than 100% will “zoom in” the texture and only include elements toward the center. A patch scale of 100% was used for both the floor texture and the plaster texture. More details about scaling patches can be found in ”How to Efficiently Scale Your Patches”.

Image 4: The Make Seamless tab.

Step 3: Upscale

With a seamless patch, the next step is to upscale the texture set. In this step, Poly’s AI is used to increase the texture resolution of the patch to enhance the quality. You do this by navigating to the Upscale Texture tab. In this tab, you can select either a 1k, 2K, 4K or 8k texture resolution. We chose a 4k texture resolution for both textures.

Image 5: The “Upscale Texture” tab.

Step 4: Generating PBR Maps

Next, the AI will generate a PBR texture set based on our seamless and upscaled patch. First, you must select a PBR material type. There are a number of different material types to choose from; your selection here will drastically affect the look of the PBR material. The options can be seen in Image 6.

Image 6: PBR map material types.

Essentially, these maps are used to influence how the roughness, normal, height, ambient occlusion, and metalness maps are generated. You can follow your intuition at this step, but sometimes it takes a bit of experimentation to determine which PBR map will give the best result. In the case of our floor and plaster textures, the Diverse setting gave us good results, as shown in Image 7 and Image 8. This setting tends to give good results when a texture has both smooth and bumpy elements, which is the case with floorboards or a roughly plastered wall. ”How to Select the Right PBR Material Type” has more information on what each material type does.

Image 7: The wooden floor texture as seen in the Poly viewer. The Diverse PBR map was selected for generating this texture.

Image 8: The plaster wall texture as seen in the Poly viewer. The Diverse PBR map was also selected for generating this texture.

Step 5: Downloading the Texture

Finally, once a suitable PBR map has been selected and applied, the texture set can be downloaded. You do this by clicking on the blue “Download” button in the top right corner of the Poly window. A dropdown will appear, and you can select the desired image type. The options for users on the Infinity plan are 8-bit JPEG and 32-bit EXR. Clicking on the Export button will initiate the download; a .zip file of the texture set in the chosen format will be saved to your Downloads folder.

Image 9: Download drop down menu in the Poly browser window.