Textures can be an incredibly powerful modeling tool. This may seem a little weird, but consider the rendering of a rendering of a chain-link fence created almost entirely from textures. To model the chain links intertwining would be a large task in itself; to model hundreds and thousands of these intertwining links would be a nightmare.
To begin, look at what the geometry of the model actually entails. Notice that everything in the scene is a simple primitive, including the flat plane that will become the chain link. The polygon count is low and the model interaction is snappy. To create the chain-link texture that defines more about geometry than anything else, begin with a photograph or an image of chain link. The image was carefully framed so that I had one square of the chain link against a solid blue sky, making it easy to “knock” the sky out. Be sure that when building textures that will define visual geometry to make the photograph as straight on as possible.
You do not want to have to fight perspective when attempting to create the texture. The perspective will be handled by the 3D application, so keep your textures as orthographic as possible. Break down the texture to its most fundamental building block by copying one section from the original image and pasting it into its own file. By breaking it down to its simplest shape, we can begin to make the shape a pattern and make it seamless, so that as it repeats across the surface of the model, we will not be able to tell where one copy of the texture ends and the next one begins.
The next thing to do is begin to make the shape seamless. To do this, we need to make sure that each part of the chainlink square is seen only once. Crop the image so that each part of the pattern is only visible one time. Since this shape will be repeated and the link on each side of the square is just a repeat of the link opposite it, we only need to show two. To make sure the texture is seamless, use the Offset filter in Photoshop to wrap the texture around so you can see the seams in the middle of the image.
