I was looking at making available a tool I wrote for creating/editing Perlin-Simplex noise textures. It’s not a plug-in. One of the possible uses for this tool would be to make textures that could be imported into Unreal.
I don’t have much experience with texture editing (am more a sound guy) so I was wondering if I could get some feedback as to what would make this an interesting “toy” or not. I don’t see investing a lot of time into making some sort of texture-editing super-tool. But I do figure that there are some basic aspects that should be handled if this is going to be at all useful.
Here are some simple samples to give an idea:
The dimensions and level of detail of the images can be changed. The “frequency” of the noise variations is specifiable in the X and Y. Multiple “octaves” can be mixed. The maximum number of colors/shades for a given image is 256: an editable color mapping tool is included.
I’m thinking for a good tiling texture, the tool should have some means for smoothing out the edges so that tiling will not show the tile edges so readily. Before attempting to provide this, I wanted to ask if there are readily available graphics tools for doing this sort of editing? It seems like it might be a redundant effort on my part, in which case I’d leave the tool where it just provides the “raw material,” so to speak, and leave the editing done for making smoothly linked tiles to others who are more capable.
The tool also can make simple gifs (animation on z-axis at this point). I originally wrote it to learn how to mix and code noise-based textures. But if the generated graphics could be useful for game textures, that would be a plus.
I see that there is an Unreal plugin for Simplex Noise! Looks pretty cool. It is being used (it seems to me) for things like terrain generation. What I have is a Java app and I’m not aiming to make it a plug-in. The idea is more that it would be a separate toy/tool for making importable texture graphics.