Models:
- Animium: Free 3D Models and 3D Tutorials, with Photoshop Brushes
- Blend Swap
- SciFi 3D
- 3D CAD Browser
- Blender 3D Model Repository
- 60 Excellent Free 3D Model Websites
- Render Textures: very good wood floors
- 3D Diva: free textures and architectural stuff
- Free Textures, Brushes, Patterns, and Design Articles: Looks good. Has some texture bundles.
- CG Textures
- Open Game Art
- Texturez
- Burning Well Textures
- Public Domain Pictures
- Ben Cloward Textures and other related tools and tutorials.
- CG Skies: source for high resolution panoramic HDR skies. Has links to additional HDR, panoramic, and stitching resources.
- Total Textures 19 DVD Bundle: non-free
- designrs hub: texture resources
- Photoshop Patterns
- Impressive Free High Resolution Textures and Backgrounds
- List of Free Texture Sites
- Texture X
Applications for height/displacement, normal, specular maps:
- Spiral Graphics Genetica: editor of seamless textures, animated textures, and HDRI environment maps! Genetica is a standalone application available on Windows XP and above. Found through a link at Textures With Genetica.
- Filter Forge: A plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows you to build your own filters.
- StackExchange question, has a list of applications for texture map creation
- Blender Artists Evaluated Mapping Tools
- Crazy Bump: Create displacement, normal, specularity ... maps.
- Knald: After previewing it, this looks like it will be my goto application. Impressive what it can do with photographs.
- Gimp with a couple of add-ons: normalmap and Insane Bump. May only work in 32 bit mode. Insane Bump Updates may work on 64 bit systems, and may be faster. For some extra help: Texture Normal Map Tutorial in GIMP.
- ShaderMap 2: Create rendering maps in seconds.
- PixPlant: Great 3D Textures, Quickly. Has an additional feature of helping to create textures which can be tiled. If the tile mode had an edit mode associated with it, it would be terrific. As it is, the auto-tile function needs post processing to fix things up. But it certainly does a good first attempt and seemless tiles.
- MaPZone 2.6, which looks like it hasn't been updated in a while, and a bunch of links are broken. The company looks to have evolved into more substantial products called their Substance Pack. Tony Textures xNormal: Bakes Your Maps
Tutorials:
- How to Create a Seamless Concrete Texture & Thea Render Materialj
- How to generate a displacement map for a tilable texture with Blender
- Creating Realistic Materials for Blender Projects
- The Secrets of Realistic Texturing
- Create Texture Maps in Gimp
- Tiling Texture Maps with Offset: a good tutorial showing: a) how to cut out regions, paste them, and use eraser to blend the edges, which I used for fixing tiling seams and obvious repeats, b) using a second picture of twice the dimensions, and using pattern-define on the first image, then image fill on second image to check tiling results.
Notes:
- Add a glossiness map to specular alpha, so that you can have dirty parts reflect light worse than clean parts.
- Manual normal map: a) open image in image editor, b) make another layer on top, fill with black, and set opacity to 50%, c) with black layer activated, fill the areas you want to bump up with white, d) grey the transitions appropriately, e) set opacity to 100% and save image, f) generate normal map, g) b/w image can be used for displacement.
- From David Hier: to remove the seams, I find that the least destructive method is to copy sections of the texture to new layers and erase the edges to blend everything together. You can also use the heal, patch or clone tools if you prefer, but I find that they can create too many artifacts. Try flipping your copied sections in both directions to avoid obvious repetitions.