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Custom brush from a photo

Time: 25 minutes. Difficulty: Beginner.

Use the Eyedrop tool plus the Brush Studio to author a brush whose stamp is a tileable extracted from a photograph (concrete, foliage, fabric, etc.).

Prerequisites

Import the photo

  1. File > Import > Image… and pick your photo.
  2. The image lands as an Image placement.

Extract a tileable

  1. With the image selected, File > Extract Texture from Image….
  2. The Designer finds a seamless tile (a square crop with edges stitched to match) and writes it to ~/.elysium/textures/.
  3. A small dialog confirms with the path of the extracted tile.

The extractor uses simple seam-aware cropping; the result tiles without visible edges in most cases. For tough source photos, try a different crop area in the dialog.

Build the brush

  1. Window > Brush Studio (or click Studio in the Brush Library).
  2. Pick engine Texture.
  3. In the Texture column, click "Pick file" and select the extracted tile you just made.
  4. Set texture_scale = 1.0, texture_rotation = 0.
  5. In the parameters column: size_px = 60, opacity = 0.8.
  6. Author dynamics: bind pressure → opacity with a linear curve.

Preview

The Studio's preview canvas shows a sample stroke. Adjust tint_strength to taste: at 0 the stroke is pure texture color; at 1 it picks up the brush's color.

Save

Click Save in the Studio footer. Name the brush ("Concrete", "Foliage", "Burlap" etc.). It lands in the Brush Library under My Presets.

Use it

B to activate Brush, open the Library, click your new preset. Paint on any selected placement.

Export to share

Right-click your preset in the Library > Export to .elybrush…. The resulting file embeds the tile as base64; share it directly with teammates.

What you exercised

  • File > Extract Texture from Image….
  • Brush Studio engine selection.
  • Dynamics curve authoring.
  • Saving to the user Library.
  • .elybrush export.

See also