Any B2M users here?
none01ohone
Posts: 862
I just noticed that Silo2 and B2M (Bitmap2Material) are on sale through Steam. I've already got Silo but was wondering if anyone has any experience using B2M. Can anyone recommend it. I've got until Tuesday to decide, as that's when the sale ends.
I don't have any of the modellers that are used as render engines via plugins for B2M, such as Unity, Max, Maya etc.
Thanks.
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You can use the free Substance Player to generate images from B2M, resolution over (I think) 2.048 depends on your video card. I tried a the demo a little while ago and couldn't get anywhere with it - looking at the videos they don't seem able to completely eliminate the shading from either the height maps or the diffuse, I have asked elsewhere if anyone has any maps created with B2M that they are willing to share as it is a very tempting offer if it will work (a lot cheaper than Crazy Bump, which seems to be its main competitor).
Thanks for the reply Richard. Even if its on a par with Crazy Bump then I think that it's a good deal. Saw Andrew Price using Crazy Bump to make some cobbled street effect in one of his tutorials for Blender. Maybe it wont be long before a plugin gets released for Blender as the available plugins for the high end modellers such as Max don't appear to come at any extra cost.
I've been looking at Youtube videos and it looks impresive. I'm not going to be a heavy user of this program, I'll just be for making the odd prop for a render.
The guy in one vid using Iclone was well impressed with it and he paid £60 Quid for it, currently its on offer for a quarter of that.
I bought B2M when it was on sale through Steam previously and I can say that it's actually much more powerful than Crazybump in my opinion, there's a lot more ways to refine results but that does make it more complicated to use. The built in mesh viewer to see how your settings look works well enough that I don't think you'd really be needing one of those render engines you mentioned, I've been happy viewing my results there before exporting to textures for DAZ Studio etc. Is there anything in particular that you're wondering about it?
Thanks for the reply. My main query was regarding the renderer, If it has an inbuilt render viewer like CrazyBump and that the external plugins to the high end modellers are not a prerequisite to getting the program to run, which has been confirmed by yourself and Richard.
Now that I know that it can be used as a stand alone program and that you also think it has more options/versatility than CrazyBump, I'm going to use some Steam credit to buy it.
I'm not a modeller and only dabble, so I don't really have any other specific queries, thanks for the offer. At the moment I just want something to produce the odd wall texture. But who knows, maybe I'll end up using it for more than that.
Cheers guys.
DimensionTheory, I'd be very interested in seeing how it does with a textured image and the resultant height and diffuse maps, if you have anything you can share. The only before and after I'd seen is what they show in the promos and I wasn't impressed - there seemed to be a lot of the lighting of the source image bleeding through into the height/displacement map and into the diffuse - but on the other hand some of the 3D results they posted looked better. I'm wondering if it could, say, take a photo of a relief carving and turn it into diffuse/bump or displacement that would respond plausibly to changing lighting.
I'm interested in this product as well. DT answered some of my questions but I wanted to know...
Is this a stand alone program as all I'm seeing talked about on line is using it as a plugin for the high end modelers. I use ZBrush mainly for my content creations. Be nice if there were a plugin for this for ZBrush, that would be awesome.
That's really my main question. I have ShaderMap 2 which is OK. For the price it's great but a bit confusing to me in some ways. The B2M looks very robust and might be a program I wouldn't mind actually learning.
As I said above, you can use the free Substance Player to create textures with B2M (B2M is a special substance, as produced by Substance Designer, with parameters that can be tweaked in the plug-ins of the free player to control the map used and what settings are applied). The free player can be better than the plug-ins - in modo the plug-in is limited to 2K maps while the player can go higher.
So I'll need to invest in Substance, B2M and the Player? I thought B2M allowed for importing one's own textures?
All of the problem images I've come across are pretty understandable. Things like walls with mortar that's lighter in tone than the bricks will confuse it a bit, because by default it'll make the mortar protrude more than the bricks in displacement. There are tools for fixing that though which I think most of B2M's strengths come from, being able to use shape recognition to find the bricks then pinch their brightness a little helps give them definition. Inverting the brightness of the base image before using shape recognition to find the bricks gives the light mortar a proper negative value while retaining the positive value for the bricks. These types of maps and images like the pillar in the Steam page's promo are probably a worst case scenario which should probably be run through Photoshop to help the depth before going through B2M.
I've put together a simple example of what I think is good usage. This is coming from FilterForge where I can export depth etc already but I rendered that all together before putting it through B2M, the results here would be the same for a real world photo of a similar surface. One complaint that I have about the way it works is that normal maps are tied to it's height map values, so I have to export twice with different settings in order to get large feature depth with small feature (high detail) normal maps. I do like that it can export .HDR though, now that DS supports .HDR maps I've been making all my depth maps that format (with Photoshop you have to switch to 32-bit before applying your blurring etc to get the fidelity but B2M uses higher bit depth when editing by default).
The player is free and included in the download, I didn't have to get anything other than B2M and I'm able to do all of my texture work within the program by default.
Thanks so much for the info. Off to purchase then! :-)
That actually shows the things that bother me - there appears to be a y-shaped ridge in the middle, circled in my screenshot, which I would expect to have a bifurcating line of bright with the tones darkening away from it on the downslope. But in the height map it appears to go up to the ridge, but then the shaded downslope is very dark - creating a chasm under the average height rather than a gradient down to the average height. I can't decide if it's doing that in the render with the images applied to a plane or not, but I think so.
It doesn't seem to have a save settings option, only load. :(
Means you'll have to tweak each texture individually :(
I could get instant results without reading any documentation with the CrazyBump trial, not so with this though.
Click on the button marked "Presets" on the Bitmap2Material bar that contains settings for output size, then select new file. It'll give you a dialog for saving a preset that contains all the tweaks you've made to that texture, after saving it the preset will appear in that same menu where is says "PresetA" (which I saved right before taking the screenshot).
Yeah I know parts like that can be an issue. The way shape recognition works helps to get around some of these things along with the tone mapping it has, but since the underlying process relies on brightness from the original image I think things like highlights and other lighting effects will always cause problems. It really kind of needs to be as diffused an image as possible for it to really work perfectly, I think CrazyBump has the same problems.
I have a bunch of different versions of the height map here if you want to look them over. The first four are using different shape recognition directions, which shifts highlights around in an attempt to alter the lighting direction of the original image. Out of those I think the 3rd one bests fixes the specific issue you had with this particular map. Image 5 here has no shape recognition at all so it's basically using the lighting direction of the base map.
Had to make another post since I was only allowed to attach 5 images to the last one. Images 6-8 are using different tone mapping which can be used to change the influence of features and possibly remove or alter parts that cause the sorts of problems you're talking about.
Thanks DimesionTheory, I was trying to save a sample preset but it was greyed out and not selectable, so I had to alter a slider for it to function.
Thanks again. Strange place to put a save option.
Didn't fiddle with the sliders and my texturing isn't great....
Thank you, it does look as if the tone mapping may help somewhat. I'm probably expecting miracles, or a Make Art Materials button.