Texture MakerMake cool textures and background tiles for webpages
Texture Maker, 233Kb
The trick to making a background is to make one that seamlessly overlaps when tiled. Texture maker first generates a plasma fractal. You can then apply various filters, rotations, and other mathematical gizmos to it to further customize it (you can change the color too). Knowing what you're doing isn't a requirement: just press some buttons to try some effects and get cool textures. As you go along you can make a tilable version based on the fractal just by selecting a few options and pressing a button. A finished background preview lets you know what the texture will look like as a tiled background. Save the ones you like. A brief readme file tells you what to do, and online help is available.
Texture Maker Tip: The tile is saved as a TGA (targa) file. To be a background, this needs to be changed to a GIF or JPG file. You can use the image viewer from BCAD to convert the file. Just load the targa file, and then resave it as a GIF or JPG. You can't use GraphX for this, because it has a bug and can't read files generated with Texture Maker, even though it can read targa files. This is a problem with GraphX, not Texture Maker-- the targa files are normal.
Oh, and check out the cool example textures, already converted into JPG format.
Texture Maker is a DOS program, but you can use a mouse and it has a fully graphical interface. Despite the mathmatical calculations involved, Texture Maker works o.k. on a humble 386 (It works o.k. on an arrogant one too).