tg (free)

[Tami]

[url=\"http://www.blackpawn.com/dev/tg.html\"]tg is a texture generation / synthesis tool[/url]. use it to create beautiful textures for demos and intros or just for fun. tg saves textures to an easy xml format which you can even process with your own tools. tg is based on the old bptg, but now it uses a new ui and a stacking system like werkkzeug. this is version 0.3b of tg. since the version is less than 1.0 it means this is a test version. it's not done and may hurt you. like emotionally or something. also tg uses mmx instructions so you can't run it on some old machine. tg even uses a couple mmx extensions and who knows what processor those were first added to.
load a sample

download tg.zip, extract to some directory, and then run tg.exe. click on the big load button and select one of the included sample files. on the right you should now see a bunch of nodes. click on any node and press S on the keyboard to view the data at that node. click on the lowest node in the vertical chain and hit S to view the final texture.
working with nodes

nodes can be moved by dragging them with the mouse. they can also be resized by dragging the resizing bar on the right of any node. to create a new node, right click and select a node type. when a node is selected, its properties are displayed in the lower left. special load and save nodes can be used for complicated textures. use a save node to make a copy of the current texture then use that in any number of load nodes. just give them all the same name.
changing properties

properties are manipulated with a variety of controls. most are displayed with spinner controls. these look like boxes with a number in the center. to change the value, click and hold on the spinner then drag the mouse up or down. when a spinner has focus you can also use the keyboard arrow keys to fine tune the value. color controls look like a group of four raised spinners. with any color channel spinner selected, hit space bar to lock all channels then drag up and down or use the arrow keys to change all four channels at once. the order of the channels is red, green, blue, alpha.
previewing

the texture is displayed in the upper left. it shows the data at the active node (the one you displayed by hitting S which is not necessarily the selected node). the texture is updated in real time so you can tweak parameters effectively. there are three display modes for the texture: rgb, argb, and a. rgb shows what's in the color channels. rgba blends the image to pink (the bad color) where there is alpha. a just shows the alpha channel in grayscale.