Pixplant is a simple, but powerful, pro texturing tool for macOS

By Aaron Lee

FaronStudio’s PixPlant is a professional texturing tool for macOS and Windows. The app offers an integrated environment for the creation of 3D maps from plain photos.

The purpose of PixPlant is to offer a simple way to transform realistic images into useful seamless textures and 3D maps, preserving the beauty and drama of everyday life. It’s a tool that allows you to quickly add realism, variety and value to your 3D projects.

Select an image, run PixPlant, and the result is seamless texture maps. The app is used by those in the architectural visualization, interior design, 3D virtual prototyping, visual FX and game development industries.

Based on real-life photos, PixPlant generates interesting realistic textures without the complication of procedural texture generation tools. It provides easy 3D map editing with whole-image tools as well as displacement sculpting and image painting tools and real-time 3D rendering preview of the 3D maps.

The latest version (3.0.11) adds a Parallel Synth feature allowing synchronized synthesis of multiple 3D maps. This feature can be used to make synchronized tiling versions of captured materials: for example captured normal, diffuse or specular maps can be made tileable while synchronized among themselves. Can also be used for other 3D map types which are not currently natively supported by PixPlant like roughness or metallic maps.

PixPlant is available for purchase and download at the product website. On the Mac platform it requires macOS 10.7 or higher. A demo is available. Registration is $175; volume pricing is available.

Apple World Today Rating (out of 5 stars): ★★★★