Any decent texture creation programs out there? (not paint programs)

[Kerba Fett]

Years ago I saw a website for a program that would generate texture maps based on procedural components. It had a large number of shaders that could be combined and tweaked in realtime to make the texture you wanted.

For instance you might be making a piece of industrial equipment and decide you needed a row of fasteners. You could select hexbolts and it would place a row of bolt heads along a line you define. In the bolt shaders window you could adjust the size and spacing as well as the surface height.

Then maybe you decide that it's an old machine so you overlay a rust shader onto the bolts. This roughens up the surface of the boltheads and adds a rusty color to them. While you're playing with the shaders there was a preview of just that shader and the entire combined texture.

There were shaders for noise, pipe arrays, wiring systems, circuts, various water effects, and all sorts of other stuff.

Once you had a look you were happy with by combining all of these shaders the program could generate imagemaps for color, specularity, luminosity, bump, and pretty much any other type of image you'd use in a 3D program. The idea being you could quickly get complex textures without having to hand paint every detail.

I've found a few programs that are similar, but all that I've found seem to have a very narrow focus. They might do brick textures, or wood textures or ground textures or convert a picture into a set of texture maps, but so far I haven't found anything that would be useful for making textures for KSP models.

Anyone got any suggestions?

[WinkAllKerb'']

adobe cs2 even if it's now a bit old it's still a very powerfull suit and it's now "free downloadable" (google it for detail around the little mess with this "free" release) from adobe site.

[CaptainKipard]

I've used MapZone before and it's pretty decent.

http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

[Kerba Fett]

I've used MapZone before and it's pretty decent.

http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

Thank you. That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. It seems like a very cool program.