Darkling Simulations www.darksim.com offers, in its new product DarkTree 2.0, one of the most powerful procedural texture creation tools around. But as always, with power comes complexity. You probably know that procedural textures use (primarily) mathematical formulas to create images that are applied to the surfaces of 3D objects. These textures are dynamic--created on the fly, at render time--as opposed to the static 2D bitmaps used in most texturing. Thus they can be adjusted and animated in a variety of ways, and can, if constructed properly, provide a third dimension of texture, changing in depth as well as width and height (as with, for example, a block of wood). A procedural texture offers the added advantage of requiring a small amount of memory, at the cost of added render time, because the texture image must be re-calculated at each frame.
SimbiontMAX is a plug-in with support files; I'll get to the latter in a bit. The plug-in takes the form of a special material as well as a map; most of the goodies come with the former. To use the SimbiontMAX material, you choose it from max's Material Map Browser, as with any other material type. The SimbiontMAX material's principal rollout, Main Parameters, replaces the Standard material's Blinn parameters. It's here that you load a DarkTree from one of the 112 provided. You can also load any texture generated from DarkTree 2.0, but you can't load older textures from DarkTree Textures (DarkTree 1.0) unless you first convert them in 2.0.
Darkling includes a mind-boggling array of original textures with SimbiontMAX, divided into categories such as Bio, Nature, Metal, and Skin. Most are fully 3D, some are 2D, and a few work in either 2D or 3D. Much as I'd like to show you all of them, it's not practical for a number of reasons, so I'll just present a more-or-less representative sampling, along with brief descriptions of each one's Tweak settings.
Alderon
Alderon is described as an "abstract rock/organic texture." I've never seen rock that looked quite like that, but it is an intriguing look. Tweaks include five color settings and something called Alderon, which seems to affect the relative color coverages. The documentation, provided in HTML format, describes the individual settings for the included maps, but, unfortunately, not for the materials.
