It is called Materialize. It is, as stated in the title, a free Texture Generating Tool.

It is standalone and currently for Windows users only. Mac and Linux are out of luck at this time. It looks like it's for props but I'm betting some of the pros can use this for figures as well. Here are the links. Mods feel free to move this where you wish. I'm just following Earl's propensity for sharing useful links and Apps with the community. The first two links tells you all about it and the third link is the download page itself.

https://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2018/10/16/Materialize-Free-Texture-Map-Generation-Tool-Released.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtnJToPxBNo

http://www.boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/getkey.php

It's also available for Unity and the Unreal engine.

Cool! Thanks Rob!!

Ok That can be really useful for sure " Thank You "

I have used this free program for the last several months now and it seems to do a decent job. It doesn't quite generate textures from scratch, it creates bump, normal, specular and displacement maps for an existing texture map. Fun to play with and practical if you want to fine-tune specific maps or generate maps that don't exist otherwise.

very cool.

@quietrob, posts of this kind are fine here, in fact we encourage them. Thanks for sharing.

Cheers, bloke!

hborre posted at 12:09AM Sat, 14 December 2019 - #4373293

I have used this free program for the last several months now and it seems to do a decent job. It doesn't quite generate textures from scratch, it creates bump, normal, specular and displacement maps for an existing texture map. Fun to play with and practical if you want to fine-tune specific maps or generate maps that don't exist otherwise.

On the site it says for use in games, so is the quality good enough for use in high end renders from Poser, DS, ZBrush, or whatever 3D app(s) you prefer to use?

This is a render of EL Grey Alien with bump, normal and specular maps generated through Materializer. Tweeted the skin color in photoshop and rendered in Superfly.

That's very good, hborre. I've been struggling to get better bump, normal and specular maps in Materialize. I just wish there was a tut that would do that.

Thanks for the render hborre. That gives me an idea of what can be accomplished, as I'm not into gaming, which usually means lower resolution graphics than what I'm used to in the 3D apps I use regularly.

These tools work when they work and don't when they don't. Your level of 3D sophistication and discernment will determine the suitability for your purpose.

This is a screen cap from a video showing how "great" this works. The author doesn't even acknowledge the ridiculous distortion of this otherwise perfectly circular and flat object. This is not a fault of this program, but rather of the entire premise - you cannot produce accurate maps from a single diffuse photo.

It generally is suitable for "natural" surfaces where you cannot actually tell which shapes are right or wrong. For man-made surfaces that are clearly not irregular in shape, it gives results that are not correct.

Try it on this:

LOL

WOW, those look like deflated balloons.