To make mods and game assets I use several applications. All of these are listed below.
Blender (free/donation) https://www.blender.org/ | Typically used for creating and working with 3D meshes, materials and UV mapping, and exporting these as well. |
Materialize (free) https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/ | A simple image-to-material tool for making new texture maps out of a diffuse map. |
Topaz Gigapixel AI (paid/subscription) https://www.topazlabs.com/ | This upscale tool can upscale any low-resolution image/texture to very high resolution without losing image quality. |
GIANTS Editor (free) https://gdn.giants-software.com/ | The primary tool for working inside GIANTS Engine for Farming Simulator modders. |
GIANTS Texture Tool (free) https://gdn.giants-software.com/ | A simple file-drop-to-convert tool to generate readable DDS files primarily for textures used in mods for GIANTS Engine/Farming Simulator. |
Paint.NET (free/paid/donation) https://www.getpaint.net/ | Another commonly used application for simple image editing, layer blending, adding various effects, and can also be used to make new textures from scratch. |
Blender Add-Ons
For Blender, I use several add-ons that are available through Blender directly. From Blender Market, I use the following add-ons:
Quick Baker https://blendermarket.com/products/quick-baker | Quick Baker is an exceptional PBR texture-baking addon that brilliantly utilizes Blender’s native baking operator for baking PBR, Mesh, Principled BSDF, and Cycles maps. |
Extreme PBR Nexus (2K version) https://blendermarket.com/products/extreme-pbr-addon-for-blender-279-2 | This is a quick material tool. The user doesn’t need to use material nodes or shader nodes. It’s also suitable for playing with various materials, and this tool comes with 1800 different materials. |
Smartify Nodes https://blendermarket.com/products/smartify-nodes | A tool for working with materials in Blender that has similar features to Extreme PBR, such as dragging and dropping preset materials onto meshes. |
BagaPie Assets (full version) https://blendermarket.com/products/bagapie-assets | Natural and architectural assets for Blender can be dropped directly into the scene. These are mainly high-poly assets that also can be transformed into low-poly assets if needed. |
Quick Landscape https://blendermarket.com/products/quick-landscape | This is somewhat of an old add-on that is useful for generating quick terrain landscapes in Blender from highly customisable presets. |