With Hard Paint you can simulate paintings, embroidery, unusual lawns and fields and many other things that have natural or artificial look.

What ever the name is, it is not so hard to use it. Basically, what you can do with it is cool pictures that look like as if they were made of some objects. You just take one picture as a pattern and a set of smaller pictures that the program will pour over the pattern. Experiment with it and you may achieve interesting results. The program supports transparency, so the pattern can be of any shape. Even though it is not a plug-in, but a stand alone application it could be useful in conjunction with your favorite graphical editor. The picture, that is shown here, is just an example and it is not the best what can be done with the program. The program comes along with a set of images of flowers, so it will be easier for you to start experimenting. Also read the manual. The program requires DirectX 9 and a compatible video card.

Hard Paint Supported file formats
Import
1. BMP - Windows and OS/2 Bitmap
2. GIF - CompuServe Graphics Interchange
3. JPG - JPEG - JFIF Image
4. PNG - Portable Network Graphics

Export
1. BMP - Windows and OS/2 Bitmap
2. JPG - JPEG - JFIF Image
3. PNG - Portable Network Graphics

Your video card need support: vertex shader 2.0, pixel sharders 2.0, auto mipmap creation. You can find the list of compatible video cards on www.code=guy.com

Software
* All Windows desktop platforms beginning with Windows 98 through Windows Vista.
* DirectX 9.0 or above.

Hardware
* Video card Vertex and Pixel Shaders 2.0 compatible (nVidia GeForce FX 5100, ATI Radeon 9500 or above).

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this image utility software.