Real Wood Never Looked this Good
Texture Creator 2.0 has a knack for transforming design novices into imaging gurus. Once known as Adobe TextureMaker 1.0 (see Reviews, October 1995), this cross-platform texture generator from Three D Graphics makes it easy to enhance graphics, presentations, and Web sites with realistic 3-D textures. Although it's missing some of its predecessor's features, it offers more preset textures, more-precise editing options, and an improved interface.
Texture Creator lets you choose from 200 editable textures ranging from fluffy clouds to rough granite; if you don't find what you're looking for among the presets, you can easily create your own textures. A texture consists of up to seven layers, each with four adjustable properties--lighting, shading, edging (beveled or rounded), and dimensions. New keyboard commands corresponding to the properties take the guesswork out of duplicating an image.
After you change a property, Texture Creator rerenders the image and displays the results in a preview window. By clicking on a layer, you can make detailed adjustments to hue, roughness, and other attributes using numeric values and sliders. To change the lighting, you adjust the location and angle of three spotlights. Texture Creator's intuitive interface shows what layer you're working on and its relative order (represented by stacked icons); to change the order, just drag and drop the icons.
Aside from improved ease of use, Three D Graphics has added some new features to the mix. In TextureMaker 1.0, you had to adjust the application and memory requirements for every texture; the new version requires a constant 4MB of RAM. The Power Mac-only Texture Creator also saves images in more formats and doubles the number of preset textures. Other welcome additions are online help, a more comprehensive manual with tutorials, and a texture-creation wizard.
Although Three D Graphics made some nice enhancements to the program, it also left out some of TextureMaker's key features: Texture Creator can render only seven layers to TextureMaker's ten, can't create QuickTime movies, and no longer has Adobe Photoshop filters. Version 1.0's texture-animation features were eliminated to speed up the program, but you can download a free version of Texture Animator, an application that creates QuickTime and AVI movies, from Three D's Web site.
Macworld's Buying Advice
Texture Creator 2.0 packs a professional-level product into a beginner's package. Although it's missing some of TextureMaker's valued features, it's still a strong all-in-one texture designer.--ALLYSON BATES
RATING: Four Stars/7.0
PROS: Smooth, fast rendering; textures are easy to customize; intuitive interface.
CONS: No animation features or Photoshop filters; only seven layers.
COMPANY: Three D Graphics (310/553-3313, www.threedgraphics.com).
LIST PRICE: $129.99.
August 1997
page: 76
Copyright © 1997 Macworld Communications, Inc.
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