REM State

Overview

The metal tile background came from the brushed metal tutorial at BioRust, with some minor modifications for use in the Gimp. In the general sense, it really comes down to two steps to get the metal pattern:

1. Generate (grayscale) static
2. Motion-blur

Step-by-Step

Additionally, you’ll have to do some magic if you want the pattern to look decent when its tiled. I have no clue what that magic is, in technical terms, but I do know that the Gimp has a handy feature called “make seamless” that will smooth out the edges of an image to make it look better when tiled. You can make a similar texture in the span of 5 minutes using the Gimp:

1. Create a new oversized image (250×250 is fine)
2. Use the paint bucket to fill the image with any solid color
3. Select Filters->Noise->Scatter RGB
   1. Untick “Correlated noise”
   2. Untick “Independent RGB”
   3. Set each of the Red, Green and Blue controls to 1.00
   4. Set the Alpha control to 0.00
   5. Hit “OK”
4. Select Image->Mode->Grayscale
5. Select Filters->Blur->Motion Blur
   1. Set “Length” and “Angle” to taste (I used 20 and 45, respectively)
   2. Click “OK”
6. Crop the bad edge pixels out (200×200 is overkill, but easy)
7. Select Filters->Map->Make Seamless

Conclusion

That’s it—you now have a tiling, brushed-metal background. If, perchance, you want to change the color of your “metal” without having to redo all the steps above, you should open up the Layers dialog and set the current layer to “Grain extract” mode. Then, simply create a layer beneath it with the solid base color you’d like the texture to have. Remember to switch the image back into color mode if you want any color besides gray!