What is … PureRef?
Pureref is a image display program designed to streamline the display of an artist's reference images. It is simple and straightforward program that works better than just about anything else for it's intended purpose. In addition to displaying reference material, it can also be used for storyboarding. Pureref is also incredibly cheap to buy, at an optional 5£ donation.
Pureref works by dragging pictures into its window, from desktop or web. This places each item on a scalable virtual tile that can be arranged on on the virtual surface, and zoomed in and out as needed.
What is… Textures.com?
Textures.com, formerly CGTextures.com, is a subscription based stock resource website for texture maps. Depending on the subscription level, the user has a certain number of credits per month to use on textures. There is also a free option with a small number of credits that regenerate on a daily basis.
The textures are royalty free for both commercial and noncommercial use, are high resolution, and have been processed to remove distortion, color cast, and in some cases to add tiling. They are distributed at multiple sizes, with larger sizes requiring more credits.
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What is… Crazybump?
Crazybump is a tool that analyzes a source texture such as a diffuse map and attempts to generate additional supplementary maps based on that analysis. It has been in use by numerous professionals in 3d graphics since its beta was first released in 2007.
Crazybump is especially useful for generating tangent space normal maps, but can be used to create approximate height and specular maps, and a few other types. Many of these types of maps can be slow and difficult to create by hand or with freeware tools.
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