I'm also curious how this would work with a regular grid instead of hex-tiled. That is, if you blended the seams and randomly rotated each square as they do with hex-tiling, would it still look good?

And are they splatting a random hexagonal sample from a repeating tiled plane, or are they splatting the exact same image, but arbitrarily rotated? That is, are they using the fact that the image tiles cleanly or does this technique completely obviate the need to use a tiled image?