Genetica Software where did they go?
PixelPie
Posts: 329
in The Commons
I purchased my first copy of Genetica from DAZ years ago and had updated to 4.0 a few years back.
I tried to check in with their website and it cannot be reached. There are no posts or saves on the wayback machine/archives since around July of this year.
http://spiralgraphics.biz/ww_overview.htm
Does anyone know the story of what happened to them? Are they out of business or down for maintenance?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Genetica? You're talking about something that has been dead and buried for ages.
Gernetica was great (supplanted by PixPlant a long time ago) because it was the very beginning of procedural texturing. I kept the latest version (July 2013) setup in my Cloud for a few years.
You should look in the direction of Substance 3D Designer if you are still interested in this kind of stuff. It's more of this CGI era, and about... 50 billion times better than Genetica ever was.
Or, if your aim is to do what Genetica did, create a seamless texture out of anything : go for Substance 3D Sampler. Absolutely f...ing powerful and simple to use.
Lace Fabric Substance 3D Sampler
I have about 16GB of substance sources that I did in Substance Designer or that I got from Substance 3D Assets. When you mix those sources with Sampler, you can get a virtually unlimited amount of different looking textures (Smart Materials) to procedural paint with Substance Painter.
@hansolocambo I will have to check out Pixplant.. thanks.
Have purchased quite a few texturing software packages over the years...including a simple one from Steam.. Mindtext2. I own Substance.. purchased it just before Adobe took over.
Have been using Filter Forge for years including 11 obtained during a sale here --Filter Forge is one of my favorites & use it daily 
..... they all have their own unique qualities.
Just wondering if anyone knows when they left the scene or what the story was. I purchased 4.0 in 2019-3 years ago. I still enjoy using it.
Genetica 4.0.1 was release in 2013. Nothing came after that no matter how long they let the website open to gather bucks.
Wow.. that is too bad.. I hope I am still able to activate my software on my new computer once it is completed. My older copy of Substance doesn't work that great on windows following one of their updates.. it crashes I'll have to check out that sampler.. thanks for the link.
Genetica sadly died when software that allowed to you paint directly on 3D models made an entrance. The servers were kept up for years after to allow customers access to the online resources, but the software itself was dead in the water.
It really is a shame, because I have not found an acceptable alternative. I still use it a lot.
Wow... I went to their site a couple of weeks ago and it was still up... I just checked and they are definitely gone.
Theres a lesson to be learned in keeping your price high or the same long after people stopped caring about your product... They never had discounts or sales as far as I'm aware and they kept the price the same as it was when it was brand new... there was so much they could have learned from Filter Forge's business model... Especially the part about having a user filter library... and one thing I noticed with their forums, very few people shared their filters or how they made certain effects... lots of "look what I made" but not much sharing... Definitely a lesson to be learned there.
Unless you have the resources to do everything for the customers, offer tons of information on how to work the magic, offer content for free or reasonable prices, a strong community is the best bet for survival.
Genetica wasn't bad, it was however just another tool and only the pro version was worth having in my opinion (based on certain features) and the price never came down even as the competition upped their game and Genetica aged... plus they
I'd still pay $100 for the pro version if they would've had a sale... The software is still very useful for making certain effects (there are a few Filter Forge filters that deliberately try to emulate certain Genetica effects, but they don't have the same look)... had they lowered the price they could have attracted more new customers and hobbyists... but apparently they chose to pull the plug rather than try that approach.
Thats really unfortunate.
Oh, and in light of my musings above, thank you to all the forumites and folks that keep this community going... there but for the grace of they that help, so go us.
I dunno... maybe to some extent... but many of us still make our own textures from scratch... or combine generated effects with our own photo images.
Granted there are tons of PBR materials for free or purchase, but 80% of the time I opt to make my own because there is nothing close to what I want or need... you still need seamless tile textures to 3D paint a model, unless you are a wiz at nodes or that application's procedural materials creation.
By the way... $40 isn't bad for PixPlant, but most of what it does can be done for free using Materialize and AwesomeBump and an image editor (if it's even needed)
https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/
https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump
If you aren't familiar with GitHub, sometimes there is no "Download latest version" button or link, so look for the "Binary Packages" links... The appropriate Binary Package links should contain the ready to install program zipped inside.
Edited to add...
I looked at PixPlant again today and it's a lot better at creating seamless images from photos than other software... when I have time to experiment with it I'll download the trial version and test it out... if it's half as good as the YouTube videos suggest, then it's definitely worth $40... the big timesaver is it's ability to analyze a "seed image" and interpret the tiling pattern... plus it seems very easy to edit what you don't like if you see odd stuff going on in the results.
Thanks to hansolocambo for mentioning it and getting me to look at it again, as it's definitely changed a lot since I first saw it.
@McGyver thank you for the thoughtfull response! I agree there is definitely a lesson to be learned in keeping the price high. They did have sales, but very rarely. I purchased my first copy from DAZ. I also agree that there are just some effects that only it could achieve and were totally unique in its approach. I use the texturing for many projects besides 3D. Yes, it would have been fabulous for them to create a user filter library like filter forge!
While I am retired and only a hobbyist I still don't want to pay for textures for a project when I can make it with software I have already purchased. And yes, there are so many unique looks that cannot always be achieved with Substance.. not saying it is bad.. just different.
Genetica for me is like Bryce or KPT (Kai's Power Tools). Development stopped, but I still love what it can do. I am one of those into nostalgia and retro computers/software. The latest and greatest isn't always that great as the old saying goes "if it ain't broke don't fix it" applies IMO to not all but many things--however, there were improvements that could have been made. I personally don't think Pro 4.0 was that much better than its Pro predecessor..they moved around the UI and didn't care for those changes. Maybe a majority of the site got Archived
I'll have to check out materialize/Awesome Bump..as well as PixPlant trial.. I saw they arent nearly as expensive as Genetica was. I really wish I had purchased the studio version now as well as wish I had downloaded all of the Genetica library materials while I had the chance.. I know I can create my own.. but still .. so sad. I wish there was a way to get in touch with the creator.
Interestingly they do have a page on Deviantart:
https://www.deviantart.com/spiralgraphic
No maybe about it, this was the explanation given by the creator. Genetica was getting some features for working with 3D textures, such as support for making normal maps, but the landscape changed drastically with the arrival of the aforementioned software, and took a path Genetica couldn't follow without a ground-up rewrite. The creator took one look at that path, and decided to go on a trip around the world instead, only keeping the servers up for as long as they were still regularly used.
Interesting how they all appeared around the same time - I mean, Genetica, MapZone and Werkkzeug (perhaps there was something more like that as well). Well, as you know, MapZone much later was reborn into Substance Designer (which also led to appearance of Painter to complement). This all is very interesting, though sad to see that not every cool software gets further development. Werkkzeug also was stopped sometime later, though while it had a version dedicated just to making procedural textures, overall it was a complete package to make "demoscene" creations like realtime procedural videos or games (.kkrieger is most famous example).