Rendering has become the ultimate tool in the architect’s arsenal for communicating designs directly to clients. But with the seemingly infinite number of real-life material options that exist today, the textures built into rendering programs often fall short. In some cases, one may be able to find appropriate texture maps for their desired materials online, but when experimenting with new materials or unique colors the need for greater customization arises. In the past, perhaps you could attempt to manually create and edit your own texture maps, but this can be a long and arduous process.
Now though, programs such as PixPlant provide a simple and intuitive process for creating seamless texture maps from your own photos. According to the manufacturers, version 3 offers an integrated environment for the creation of 3D maps from plain photos. PixPlant provides users with seamless textures in seconds including those for displacement, normal, diffuse, specular and ambient occlusion maps. Because PixPlant is designed to work completely autonomously, users are not forced to learn new modeling software or rendering set up procedures.
Additionally, PixPlant provides intuitive 3D map editing with whole-image tools as well as displacement sculpting and image painting tools. To check out your maps as you edit them, PixPlant offers the capability to render 3D previews in real time. With the launch of version 3, PixPlant is offering a giveaway of three full copies of their software, worth $175 each. Enter below for your chance to win!
PixPlant is available now for Windows and Mac OS X in both full and freelancer licenses. A fully-featured demo, video tutorials, screenshots and more information are available here.
