PixPlant

PixPlant is an advanced software application that aims to create textures from images. This is a 3D program that helps with designing and editing textures and 3D maps.

The program’s features are well crafted and organized in an overall clean and straightforward editing environment.

You are welcomed by a wizard at startup that presents a series of actions that you can activate.

They are grouped into several categories, namely Texture for creating a tiling texture from a photo and extracting all 3D maps from a picture, Diffuse for neutralising shading in a file and opening/editing a diffuse image, and Displacement for extracting displacement from an image, importing displacement from a normal map, and opening/editing a displacement map.

You can have a look at other categories, like Normal to import and edit a normal map, Specular to extract a specular map from a photo and open/alter a specular map, and Ambient Occlusion to render AO from a displacement map and import/modify an AO map.

Textures can be exported to JPG, BMP, GIF, JP2, PSD, PNG, TGA, or other file formats. The tool allows you to import images with the same file formats at the output ones.

PixPlant lets you zoom in or out of the textures and enable a 3D view mode. You are allowed to extract 3D maps from photos or from generated tiling images, generate Displacement, Normal, Diffuse, Specular and Ambient Occlusion maps, as well as make use of fine-tuning editing parameters for each map.

The utility helps you make use of a step-by-step approach for simplifying seed image preparation, work with a pixel editor, and edit 3D maps in an external program.

The final verdict is that PixPlant gathers a comprehensive package of features under its hood and is suitable especially for professionals. The generated textures can be used in the field of architectural and interior design, visual effects, and game development.

In case you have Photoshop installed on your computer, the program offers support for a graphic plugin that you can try on. It’s called PixPlant for Photoshop.