A reliable workflow
Wrap gradients avoid a false border wall
Wrap-aware gradients prevent the filter from inventing a hard clamp at the tile boundary, but cannot repair a visibly mismatched source pattern.
Move the seam to expose it
Offset inspection places the outer edges in the center, where a seam is easier to compare without the viewport boundary hiding it.
Edge blending can create a new artifact
Edge blending changes source structure. Wide blends may hide a border while introducing a repeated soft band or duplicated feature.
Make the scalar source tile before trusting the normals
A seamless normal map generator can sample across opposite edges, preventing the gradient filter from inventing a wall where a tile repeats. That does not make unrelated edge content continuous. Offset the source so all four borders meet near the center, then correct large pattern mismatches before applying edge blend. Use the heatmap to locate remaining vector differences and inspect a 3×3 grid for both horizontal and vertical seams. A seamless normal map generator should preserve intentional features, not conceal a bad source beneath a wide soft band.
Check repetition at more than one scale
After the border is continuous, zoom out far enough to see a large field. A seamless normal map generator may remove the edge line while leaving an obvious central motif, duplicated stone, or low-frequency brightness wave. Reduce strength or filtering that produces high-frequency sparkle in smaller mip levels, and judge the texture at its expected UV repeat. Export PNG, import with repeat wrapping and non-color normal handling, then inspect the actual material. Seamlessness is a property of the full sampling pipeline, so the seamless normal map generator is only one stage of the verification.