MapZone2 - A Free (as in beer) Procedural Texture Creation Tool

[Amphetamine]

You guys may have a use for this: http://www.mapzoneeditor.com

It's a texture creation tool that works in a procedural way and (once you understand how it works) lets you create some amazing looking textures, especially organic/natural type surfaces. It can also be used for creating skins, however that is very complicated indeed.

You guys may want to have a quick check through the license on teh download page, but it allows the textures created with it to be used for comercial purposes, so I believe anything that has been created with it could be GPL'd.

Enjoy.


***EDIT***

Here's a couple of shots of textures I've made while playing around with it:





No artistic talent required, just a technical mind to figure out how it all works.

[dmn_clown]

nice restriction in the EULA:

You are not authorised to work around any limitations in the software.

Not as bad as Microsoft's EULA but still, telling people that if there is a bug in their software that they have to use it only in the way they tell you is is a very bad idea.

Edit:  10 minutes with the GIMP no such restrictions, very similar to your second texture.

[Amphetamine]

Already had the discussion about MapZone vs Photoshop over on map-center.com. MapZone, PS and GIMP all have their own merits, but this is the only one I've been able to achieve those sort of results with. MapZone would of course be useless for working with photosources, but it's perfect for making dirty or distressed looking surfaces from scratch and as I said earlier it requires no artistic skill to use it. I would give it a try, because it's a far more powerfull tool than you'd think. I don't think that it would be somthing you'd want to produce a full matching set of textures in, but using it in combination with PS/GIMP would give you a very powerfull set of tools to work with.

[Blaenk]

I agree with you Amph, nice find!

[Caldiar]

Indeed.
I use GIMP and Photoshop 7.0 but I've still yet to tinker with this little program Amp's been telling me about on the map-center irc channel (sorry amp!!)
It looks very neat and considering that you dont need to be artistic to work it I'm sure this would appeal to people of the more technical mindset.

(Amp, if you're wondering, this is Silicone_Milk)

[dmn_clown]

I'm not arguing against the software itself or it's usefulness, just the license and the lack of GNU/Linux support.  I only run Debian Etch's AMD64 port so unless it runs in wine I won't be able to use it.

If they'd fix the objectionable parts of the EULA and port it to linux, I would consider it.

[Caldiar]

nice restriction in the EULA:

You are not authorised to work around any limitations in the software.

Not as bad as Microsoft's EULA but still, telling people that if there is a bug in their software that they have to use it only in the way they tell you is is a very bad idea.

I'm not understanding this EULA at all. You can still take the product from the software and import it into another media-editing program to fix what would otherwise be borked by the original software's bug right?

[dmn_clown]

Wouldn't that be a "workaround"?

[Caldiar]

Nay.
It's an "enhancement by means of another program"

Yeah, that does sound like a workaround though. Wow who was the genius who came up with that EULA?

[dmn_clown]

Someone that was only thinking about code and probably not thinking what the EULA meant to people that will use it.

[Amphetamine]

They do actually sell software as well. I believe that the line is probably part of the standard legalese that they include with all downloadable products like trial versions, to try and stop people from taking screen caps to export textures when saving has been disabled in the trial for example. It's not uncommon to see the same licenses get re-used verbatim from product to product.

In any case, I doubt that their legal team meant speciflicly to annoy you when they wrote it dmn_clown.