Is there a good, free program or software for making textures or materials? I'm using 3D studio max to model some interior/exterior environments and I need someway to to create custom materials/textures. Any advice or recomendations?

Gimp is free and has many of the same texture-making capabilities of Photoshop. Or you can go around taking photos then do a bit of hacking to turn them into tiling textures. All of this will be single-layer textures, of course. Pro textures typically have more than one layer.

Gimp is free and has many of the same texture-making capabilities of Photoshop. Or you can go around taking photos then do a bit of hacking to turn them into tiling textures. All of this will be single-layer textures, of course. Pro textures typically have more than one layer.

Thanks for that advice! And yea, I'm not looking for proffesional textures, so Gimp looks like it should get the job done.

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1314735695' post='4855610']
Gimp is free and has many of the same texture-making capabilities of Photoshop. Or you can go around taking photos then do a bit of hacking to turn them into tiling textures. All of this will be single-layer textures, of course. Pro textures typically have more than one layer.

Thanks for that advice! And yea, I'm not looking for proffesional textures, so Gimp looks like it should get the job done.
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Additionally to gimp you could take a look at mapzone a free, procedural texture generation tool. I can be really helpful for environment textures.

Genetica is not free (has a 30 day free trial), but it's the best content creation software I've ever spent money on.

Genetica is not free (has a 30 day free trial), but it's the best content creation software I've ever spent money on.

How does Genetica compare with MapZone and the more expensive FilterForge?