Program to create normal maps

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi. I’ve tried to create a normal map for a bark texture in blender using this tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOyBySopcAU but seem that this method doesn’t wotk well with complex textures. I did some searc around the internet for programs and plugins to create normal maps. Most people have used nvidia plugin for photoshop but seem it haven’y been developed further since 2008 and doesn’t work in never photoshop. Even it would work i can’t afford even for the stundent lisence of photoshop so i would need another alternative. So what people use these days to create normal maps? I found couple software.

There have been some plugin for normal map in gimp but it doesnt seem to exist anymore (http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/dds/#download. Someone have made new some plugin to google code http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/ but i can’t find any review is this really a working solution or what. Another plugin found was to paint.net Normalmapplus http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?showtopic=17010. Lastly there was a free program called xnormal, but again i didn’t find any reviews for it (http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx).

Does people have any expierence of these plugins/programs? Are these good to make normal maps and are these safe to use (doesn’t contain viruses or malvare etc.).

Thank you in advance.

2

Why don’t you try them out to see if they give the results you are happy with.
xnormal has been out for a long time and is a well known piece of software.

3

if you have the 3D model you could make it in blender see wiki page bump/normal map

and if you have a color picture you could make a bump/mormal map with nodes too

or use the bas relief script to male an image with some relief or an equivalent of normal / bump map but no built yet for vista

you could also make a displacement map from a picture and them may be with blender make a normal map out of it ! but never tested this one before!

hope it helps

4

A lot of people like crazybump.

5

I’ve looked for crazybump, but it cost money :frowning: and as a student i’m allways broke :stuck_out_tongue:
XNormal seems quite good program from it’s description but i really can’t find any user experience articles from it so i was wondering before if xnormal was a hoax or something. Run now a virus scanner to it and it seems clean.

Anyway i’m going to give xNormal a try this week. Hope it’s good :smiley:

6

XNormal is awesome and is used quite heavily by game artists. Although CB is great for what it does… 2D images to bumps, normals, etc., last I used it- when it was free- it had no way of creating normal maps from 3D geometry, only 2D image maps.

XNormal has its own sticky thread over at polycount.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41776
Note that it was started in 2006 and is over 75 pages long… but there is lots of good xN info in there from game industry users as well as the dev himself (jogshy).

P.S.
xNormal has its own user forum at Eat3D:
http://eat3d.com/forums/xnormal