A great texture procedural texture editor supporting nomal map s also !

Just wanted to share this great free tool

mapzone editor

Thanks for pointing that out! I guess they made it free since they are launching a new and improved product line called "Substance".

It is free for quite some time. I used it already some years ago. And I can really recommend it. I find it better than some expensive or less expensive texture generators. For me it was the best one.

But on the other hand you always see the procedural generation, it never looks absolutely realistic. I personally prefer to model the texture as real mesh and render it out in Modo. It takes the same time or is even faster compared to creating all these procedural nodes you would need to get the same result.

The advantage of something like that (substance) in a realtime game is: You have smaller files to download. But the customer does not really have an advantage. The textures will be created during the first start of the game and will be stored on the HDD. So in the end it takes the same amount of memory on hard dics and in memory as any other texture.

I have used mapzone(and I am still using it today sometimes), and I agree with machinery Frank:
the textures can look good, but it is hard to get them realistic.
too bad they aren't updating the software anymore.
a nice feature is that you can easyly make the right normal maps of textures.
I don't actually know which approach is faster: mapzone, or modelling the texture.
With mapzone you can create a decent looking texture in around 30-40 minutes.
At this moment I use photo's to create textures from, which gives great results.
for most games the textures will fit, except those that need ultra realistic ones.

just curious, how does modelling a texture work?