Adding variation to materials using gradient masking.

Fantastic presentation on some techniques valve used to add more texture variations in left4dead 2 without using up massive amounts of memory.

Ryan James Smith discusses some details of the technique further on his blog.

MaxScript Treegen tool

Ah, I miss modelling in 3dsMax (I'm back to the 9-5 Maya mind bender) And now that I have seen this tool I miss 3dsMax even more! This guy Ryan Smith has made a tree generation script for Max and has even open sourced it for everyone to tinker in! What a guy!

Tree Generation Script (polycount forum)

Automating Photoshop layer exports with Python...

This has always been something on my ever so long wish list- how to automate texture exports based on group names in Photoshop. Given the current pipeline I am working in requiring three different textures saved from the master PSD in two different locations (giving you a total of seven texture files to handle per material, with the PSD!) it would be wonderful to have a script that just spits out the TGAs and sends them on their happy way.

Ah, what a wonderful dream, until I came across this script from Adam Pletcher that pretty much does that! Wow. Currently it is a batch command that operates on every PSD in a given location, and puts them out into the same folder as PNG format textures, but the best part is that it operates based on the group names inside the individual PSD files! Magic beans! Sure its not exactly right for my ends, but at least I know its possible!

Take a look at his web blog here, well worth a read!

-Pete