I have been playing with Filter Forge recently and thought I'd share some renderings from filters I have built. FF is a 2D procedural texture generator and also Photoshop plugin. You can see some examples on my blog page and I'll paste a few more below. Not sure if 3DGS users mostly using shaders now or still using textures. FF can export normal and other maps.

I'm still new at this but there are some amazing filters on the site and the new version adds many new features that are pretty exciting.

This first is a 'coral' filter I built - the most complex one I have tried so far.



I got some unusual results in the coral so started messing with greebly type filters





Some of the earlier filters I made (which I have to revisit because they are still noobish) include a filter to generate Photoshop brushes, one to generate crack layers (to use as layers creating my own Photoshop textures).

Here are a couple more ...




Oops, apparently the forum does't like when you post more than a certain number of images so you'll need to visit the site to see the cool stuff. There are filters to generate flames, starfields and planets, all types of terrains, roads, 2.5D landscapes, water, lava, grass, stone walls and floors, steel panels, fences and more. There are also a ton of image filters to apply comic book, or lineart effects etc.

For the geeky scripting is possible though I don't know much about that I am afraid.

Anyway I hadn't posted in a while so here's my random contribution to a question you never asked.