Aaron Newton's blog

There have been a couple of situations in the last few weeks where I have needed to generate a seamless texture for use on a 3d model or Photoshop composition. While this sounds like a simple task, it can actually be extremely frustrating to get it right unless you know the correct technique to begin with.

Here is a decent tutorial for generating resolution independent, seamless texture tiles in Illustrator for use in Maya or Photoshop:

http://www.bittbox.com/illustrator/how-to-make-a-perfect-seamless-vector-pattern

To get this into Maya, you will need to export the pattern out to a jpg file, which can be created directly from illustrator using the 'file' > 'save for web and devices' dialogue (N.B. I saw this under the assumption that you will be using Mental Ray for Maya, which seems to struggle with formats like PSD). Once you have created your Maya file texture node, you can tweak the 'UV Texture settings' under the attribute editor to change the scale of the texture tessellation.