PMC Editing Wiki, PMC Tactical Forum, Operation Flashpoint, Falcon 4.0, Armed Assault (ArmA 1), ArmA 2, ArmA 3, Editing Tools

Editing Tools

This page is about editing tools, which are NOT specifically for the game titles we feature in our site. They are just the backbone of any good developers arsenal.

Check out PMC Tactical forum General Editing (tools) area.

3DS Max

The heavy hardcore industry standard 3d modeling and animation program.

Homepage here.

Gmax

Gmax is a light version of 3DS Max, aimed for gaming community, its free of charge but is not supported anymore.

Homepage here.

Blender

Quite popular free of charge program.

Homepage here.

LightWave

Another well known, big bulky modeling program.

Homepage here.

ZBrush 3

Homepage here.

Cinema 4D

Homepage here.

SketchUp

Homepage here.

MilkShape

Homepage here.

MudBox

Homepage here.

Polygon Cruncher (3DS Max Plugin)

3DS Max Plugin that will remove polygons from your objects, can easily help by creating lower poly resolution LODs.

Homepage here.

Modo

Model, paint, render, animate, sculpt. Their homepage also has nice coverage of video tutorials. Modo is becoming (if not already) industry standard for 3D modeling.

Homepage here.

Wings-3D

Free 3D modeling software.

Homepage here.

Anim8or

Freeware 3D modeling software.

Homepage here.

UVMapper

UV Mapping software.

Homepage here.

UVLayout

UV mapping software.

Homepage here.

Tree, bush, plant, vegetation generator software.

ngPlant, powerPlant, treeD and arbaro.

7-Zip

The best archive / packing software today, both for Linux and Windows. Only use 7-Zip. Its archive util which has more powerful packing capabilities than RAR, however its not scene accepted at 2021 yet (being reason for Linux support or whatever, its just not there yet). RAR and 7-Zip are compatible between each other.

7-Zip has command line version available for both Linux and Windows, this is very useful packing backups and addons/mods.

When you use 7-Zip makes sure to have enabled archive format: 7z, compression level: Ultra and compression method: LZMA2. These options create extremely small file size .7z archive packets.

Homepage here.

RAR

RAR was good and still is scene accepted archive program, both for Linux and Windows. It will make the packets much smaller than zip, maybe even 25-50mb on large files, its amazing difference. RAR can also open zips and many other archive formats. DO NOT USE RAR anymore, you should use 7-Zip instead.

Homepage here.

Zip

ZIP was hardcore the good old times, now it has died. DO NOT USE ZIP anymore, just use 7-Zip nowadays as its better in all areas.

Homepage here.

GIMP

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Free and open source software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Homepage here.

GraphicsMagick

Free open source command line image converter. GraphicsMagick Image Processing System. Must have for all serious addon/mod developers.

Homepage here.

ImageMagick

Free open source command line image converter. Use GraphicsMagick instead, its more advanced.

Homepage here.

Adobe PhotoShop

Commercial garbage image editing proprietary program, somewhat difficult to learn for beginners but this tool really is feature rich and good to use (once you master it).

Homepage here.

Crazy Bump

Crazy Bump is nice tool to create normal/specular maps. Its command line driven and has free and commercial versions.

Homepage here

Jasc Paint Shop Pro

PSP is much lighter and easier to use than Photoshop. Jasc was purchased by Corel, so now they say PSP is located in their web page, go figure if its the same tool anymore.

Homepage (Corel) here.

ImageSynth

Discontinued. Luxology's seamless texture generator, stand alone and Photoshop plugin. ImageSynth v2.0 is the last version released before they discontinued it due bugs and lack of support.

IrfanView

Image viewer mostly, but can also batch convert images to other formats. Excellent image viewer.

here.

Genetica

Seamless texture generator.

Homepage here

Substance Designer and Substance Painter 2

3D Painter and Seamless texture generator.

Homepage here

Quixel

3D Painter, Normals toolkit etc.

Homepage quixel.se

The Foundry MARI

3D Painter, Texture Mapping etc.

Homepage www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari

PixPlant

Normal map and seamless texture generator.

Homepage here

ShaderMap

Normal map generator.

Homepage here

Njob

Normal map generator.

Homepage here

Perl

Used for lots of stuff. Check out Active Perl for Windows (Linux has Perl built in or easy to get etc).

Homepage here.

PowerGrep

PowerGREP is a powerful Windows grep tool, its very useful to search, replace/modify several text files with simple to complex regexp search phrases.

Homepage here.

RegExpBuddy

RegExpBuddy is powerful regexp software for all your regular expressions needs. It can be linked to other editors like EditPadPro. Learn, Create, Understand, Test, Use and Save Regular Expressions.

Homepage here.

TortoiseSVN

TortoiseSVN is an SVN client, used to version control a source codes etc. Check out tutorial how to install this client here.

Homepage here.

Cool Edit Pro / Adobe Audition

Cool Edit Pro changed its name to Adobe Audition. Integrated audio recording, mixing, editing, and mastering. Record, mix, edit, and master digital audio files with powerful tools that bring flexibility and control to your desktop studio.

Homepage https://www.adobe.com/products/audition.html

GoldWave

GoldWave is a top rated, professional digital audio editor.

Homepage http://www.goldwave.com

Steinberg WaveLab 6

WaveLab 6 - Audio Editing and Mastering Suite. WaveLab 6 is the all-in-one solution for professional mastering, high resolution multi-channel audio editing, audio restoration, sample design and radio broadcast work right through to complete CD/DVD-A production.

Homepage http://www.steinberg.net/128_1.html

Sound Forge

Some sort of audio editing tool by ex Sony nowadays Magix

Homepage https://www.magix.com/us/music/sound-forge/

Audacity

The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Homepage https://www.audacityteam.org

L3DT

Its a terrain generator which uses all sorts of “advanced” stuff to create the terrain in steps.

L3DT.

Wilbur

Wilbur is a free terrain editor, this is very easy to use and even has some terrain erosion features.

You never ever should use windows notepad or wordpad to edit OFP/ArmA configs or rvmat etc scripts. So here is few much better text editing utilities which include syntax highlighting and such.

EditPad Pro

Excellent text editor with syntax highlighting and other features.

Homepage here.

Notepad++

Its a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

Homepage here.

UltraEdit

Powerful Text and Hex editor, can search and replace text in multiple files / directories.

Homepage here.