The fourth installment of Spiral Graphics Inc's popular line of free seamless texture packs has been released. With the latest pack more than 150 textures have been added to the collection, bringing the total number of freely downloadable seamless textures to approximately 600. The new pack, which contains terrain textures of all types, can be found at www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/
The textures are available in resolution-independent procedural form (GTX), as well as pre-rendered JPEGs. GTX textures can be fully edited using the Genetica seamless texture editor. Genetica provides a flexible node-based approach to texture generation that will empower you to create realistic new materials in record time. A downloadable demo of Genetica is available at www.spiralgraphics.biz/download_gen.htm

For artists without the full Genetica application, the free Genetica Viewer is provided as a quick and easy way to take advantage of the GTX-format textures. Using Genetica Viewer, numerous embedded effect maps can be rendered for the textures, including bump and specular maps. Genetica Viewer is available at www.spiralgraphics.biz/viewer/