  Texture Makers
- Gimp (free software/open source) - The Gimp, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages and is available for Linux, Mac OSX, Unix and Windows. Powerful, with many tutorials on the web - great links for the main site. Best bang for the buck.
- Filter Forge (90-day demo) - It's the very spicy (because it's so diverse), no-holds-barred plugin which allows you to make your own Photoshop filters! This isn't some crummy, unintuitive rubbish either: it's top-drawer, with a wealth of presets, many free filters already created by the FF community to download. I'm particularly hoping to see builds inworld use some wall and tile sets made from this.
- PhotoSEAM (30-day demo, Windows only) - Helps you make textures seamless like a superstar! Often, after sketching raw 768x768 chunks in ArtRage 2, I'll bring 'em into PhotoSEAM to master as 512x512s, with some buffer 'round the edges so I can cross borders smoothly. What's more, you can apply touch-up effects to come up with some radical variants of your source material. Caveats: it hasn't been updated in 6+ years and it's prone to crashing, but it's the best I've found thus far!
- ArtRage 2 (free edition available) - Simple, superb, sexy. It's a painting program with a snazzy user interface and minimal controls. Nope, it doesn't even have Copy OR Paste, but the brush tones are lush. Did I mention the glitter tool adds so much amazing depth? I can almost feel the grains get layered down when working with it.
- Context Free (free) - An elegant, refreshing program to mathematically generate art.. Starting with the 2.1, you can specify tiled rendering. Even if you don't know programming languages, it's very easy to get into Context Free by changing a few numbers around, then learn more.
- Paint.NET (free, Windows only) - Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
- Texture Maker (free demo available, Windows only) - By Reichert Software Engineering. Texture Maker is a seamless texture generator and designer. The application contains everything needed to create seamless textures for use in 3D modeling. It can create procedural and hand painted textures from scratch, remove visible seams from existing images, crop textures from photos by applying a perspective correction, render seamless tiles from structure sample patches and combine existing textures and height maps with realistic illumination. It can create animated textures and seamless animation loops. Texture Maker can be extended with plugins and automates complex operations with its scripting abilities. Nearly all functions take advantage of multiple CPUs in the system. There is also a free plugin to use the program within Photoshop. Not easy to use, unless you have a good understanding on how to work with images. The info provided on the help online is rather skimpy and don't expect to get much help from the support forum.
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