Genetica 3.0 Animated Seamless Textures

Genetica 3.0 Interface

I’ve written about Spiral Graphics seamless texture generator before, particularly their free Wood Workshop and Genetica viewer, but they’ve updated their main program (that’s the paid for version) to version 3.0, and it now does seamless animated textures. And it does them rather well too.

It uses a drag and drop interface to build up your textures, and it’s a wee bit confusing at first, but once you get used to it you can turn out some cool animated textures in no time at all. And you can also turn out those old fashioned non animated textures too, but the animated ones are a lot more fun. So much so that I spent days playing around with a beta version of the program, which is now sadly discontinued and you have to cough up the full price for the latest version.

And the price is an eye watering $899 US if you want the full featured top of the range version, which is the only one that’ll do the animations. The good news is that you can download a 30 day evaluation version from here….
http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/download_gen.htm
and the bad news is that this version will put the logo “Genetica” in the top left hand corner of all the textures you make with it.

There’s some great presets for making animated water, fire, abstract artistic anims (where I spent most of my time), transitions, VU meters & Oscilloscopes and a whole bunch more. If animating for Second Life, a 1024×1024 image will make 16 frames sized 256×256.

And here’s a tip if you’re rendering textures for Second Life – when the rendering dialog box pops up, click “Render to memory”, and then “Render to a packed square” which is the format you need for Second Life (as below).

VU Meter animated texture packed square

It’ll also render animated GIFs, which is what the ones below are.

VU Meter animated GIF

Spooky Pentacle Animated GIF

Floaty Pinky Things

Radar Scanner Animated Gif

Genetica Animated Logo

~ by slconceptual on December 30, 2008.