i have tried a few tilable texture generators but the textures just don`t look all that realistic. what would be the best programme to use to make my own tileable textures? i want them to look as realistic as possible.

msPaint...

Take high res pictures with a digital camera, upload them to you computer, and use the most widely used program for photos - MSPaint

That's one of my key ways of doing it and honestly the turn out quite well and pretty realistic when just using MSPaint.

mspaint? i`ve never used it at all before, is`nt it very basic lol. i have psp which i normaly use for textureing but to get tileable textues in that is not an easy task. thats why i was hopeing there would be something to use like texture creator which would make high quality textures. i`ll try out some high res pics in mspaint and see how i go, but i don`t hold out much hope lol.

Gimp has an automatic option to generate tilable Textures.
Given that your textures dont have to many specific features, this works quite good.

http://www.seamlesstexturegenerator.com/

It almost does everything for you, it saves my hours of work.
Even, if it doesn't work perfectly at any picture, at least the most players won't notice it.

An additional hint from the HL levels: use textures that covers at least a wall from it's ground to it's top. In most cases, the dirt at the bottom and the rims or whatever at it's top makes it more realistic. Even if its more blury than a texture which tiles three times at the same hight.

I think the GIMp option is wuite good. Otherwise you could offset the pictures by yourself and use the copyandstamp tool.

Hiya.

You could try this instead: http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html While I am slowly moving myself from Photoshop to Painter (I find I need more 'artistic flow' than 'photographic manip' nowadays), I think that Paint.NET has some SERIOUS potential. Especially if you have a 64-bit OS & System like me.