Does anyone use CrazyBump? Any feedback...?
CypherFOX
Posts: 3,401
Greetings,
I just got pointed to CrazyBump, and I was wondering if anyone here uses it?
The video showing it off makes it seem absolutely insanely useful for extended texture making, but I have no idea what the limitations might be, either commercially or in what can actually be created with it...
Given that I just recently was fighting with textures in a scene, specifically displacement mapping, I'm wondering whether applying it to some of the tiling shaders' source images might provide better normal/displacement for those shaders that don't already include them...
Is this an, 'Oh, yeah, you're not a texture artist, or you would have heard about it a long time ago...' thing? :)
-- Morgan
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Would you believe that I JUST downloaded the trial version of that like an hour ago? I also am trying the free, open-source "SSBumpGenerator," found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssbumpgenerator/
I'm curious about the normal-map generation functions. NVIDIA has a plugin that does some of this stuff -- and I've used it to do VERY simple geometry/textures for skyrim mods, but never for anything with any real resolution. I guess I'll see!
...no idea. Hate it when the only information source is a video, especially one for which the format is "unsupported". Not into just clicking links with no basic information to go on, especially when it is pointed out that they are on a "secure web thingy".
Yeah, that didn't inspire confidence! I always download and install onto my old PC when unsure of things. My powerhouse remains pristine and untouched by untested software. In any event, I haven't installed it yet because I tend to hate trial software -- because I'll install it and then forget about it until the trial is over. I'll be trying SSBumpGenerator first, mainly because it's open-source and free. Free is good!
Cypherfox, were you pointed there by a person or a browser? Just curious, because Google found it for me.
Mindtex does the same thing. I snagged it for less than a tenner on Steam.
Grab the 30 day demo.
http://frozenflamecorp.com/site/pages.php?page=news
What are your impressions of it? Does it work? I'm interested in generating bump/normals from single images, which is far from an ideal situation.
there's been quite a lot of these small normal map generators released in the past few years and Crazy bump was one of the first,it's easy to use and does what it says on the box,from memory the Nvidia one has the advantage of working inside Photoshop , there's also Xnormal if you want to create normal and height maps from a hi rez mesh.
http://shadermap.com/home/
https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer
http://quixel.se/dev/ndo
http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/
http://ssbump-generator.yolasite.com/normalmap.php
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/
http://www.3dcg.net/software/generator/
http://www.xnormal.net/
https://www.codeandweb.com/normal-map-generator
http://frozenflamecorp.com/site/pages.php?page=products
What are your impressions of it? Does it work? I'm interested in generating bump/normals from single images, which is far from an ideal situation.
Yes it works, just like Crazybump, but for a fraction of its price. There are 48 reviews currently on steam, all positive, some even prefer it to Crazybump, saying that the UI is better. I've not used it much myself as I have Bitmap2material V2 which is more expensive and works really well. I'm not a graphics artist just a dabbler.
All I can say is try the demo, see if it produces results for you. After all it's free for 30 days.
Greetings,
A person; one of the folks I follow on Twitter, who talks a *LOT* about VR, mentioned it.[...vr sidebar elided...]
Anyway, this fellow mentioned CrazyBump; his exact words were, 'crazy good texturing tool'. :) So I went and watched the video, and was suitably impressed... Grabbed the Mac version, but haven't had the time (or the right base texture) to try it yet.
-- Morgan
Wow -- thanks for these! I have much to investigate!
For bump/normal/displacement you don't need the full Substance Designer - you can use Bitmap 2 Material with the free Substance Player, but note that higher resolution output is dependent on your GPU as far as I know (CPU mode is, I think, limited to 2K images).
don't want to get OT but I found this little chestnut in Photoshop Creative Cloud 2014
For people on a nonexistent or limited budget...
I've been meaning to get Crazy Bump for some time, but I've been holding out hoping that one day there will be a sale (fat chance) or maybe someone will come up with something similar, but cheaper...
I'm gonna check out some of the above suggestions, but I figured I should add another (free) possibility to the list...
The program is called Awesome Bump.
https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump
It is for Windows only (though I think they are working on a Linux version too) and it is not a super simple installation...
Apparently it runs off of something called QT Library, and either I installed QT Library incorrectly or I installed Awesome Bump wrong (I'm more of a Mac user, so I'm not as familiar at the moment with some of the terms referred to) it's probably very easy (for experienced windows users) to install because several of the people who tried it at the site where I first read about it, really liked it and seemed to have no problem using it.
Here is the programs description in case you don't want to check out the link-
"AwesomeBump is a free and open source program written using Qt library designed to generate normal, height, specular or ambient occlusion, metallic, roughness textures from a single image. Additionals features like material textures or grunge maps are available. Since the image processing is done in 99% on GPU the program runs very fast and all the parameters can be changed in real time. AB was made to be a new alternative to known gimp plugin called Insane Bump or commercial tool: Crazy Bump."
There also is, as mentioned above the other free bump tool called Insane Bump... It is a plugin for Gimp and I haven't tried it yet either, but here is the link to its thread at BlenderArtist...
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?317041-Insane-Bump-2-0-overhauled-Crazy-bump-alternative
I hope this is useful to someone.
I tried using CrazyBump for a while a few years ago, but it didn't really give better results than the free normal mapping plugin for the GIMP.
I know, but it isn't in CS6, which is what I have. :(
Realizing this is an old thread, but...
I've been tinkering with openGL for awhile now and have come up with my own routine for converting from a bump map to a normal map. Just toying with the idea of building it into a standalone tool as seems like CrazyBump is asking way more than what this code would warrent IMHO.