Evaluated Mapping Tools

Support Materials and Textures
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mapping-outcomes.jpg953×188 66.7 KB

Andrew Price’s excellent tutorials provide much more than a “how to” guide for budding artists and those artists already in bloom by delivering inspiration and an impetus to learn. His most recent tutorial entitled “The Secrets of Realistic Texturing” introduces the fundamentals of 3D texturing while utilizing a separate piece of software that conveniently generates the different types of texture maps; NORMAL, SPECULAR, DISPLACEMENT (also referred to as height) and OCCLUSION. Feedback and comments from his appreciative readers have resulted in seeding the following list of texture mapping software that conveniently create and save these four types of texture map while noting many other similar apps exist. Please feel free to add to this list and comment on what has ended up as your number one choice for your own personal workflow. [TABLE=“class: grid, width: 100%”]

Name
Version
Release date
Platform
Cost
Support

B2M
v2.0
??? 2012
Windows & Mac
149
forum & email

CrazyBump
v1.2
??? 2010
Windows & Mac
99 Personal 299 Pro
email

InsaneBump
v?.? **
Sept. 2008
GIMP plugin
free
n/a

Knald

v1.0 beta

March 2013

Windows

open beta period

forum & email

MaPZone

v2.6.1
Jan. 2008
Windows
free
web form

MindTex
v1.0.38
July 2012
Windows
14.95
email

NDo2
v1.1.6
??? 2012
Windows-Photoshop
69 Personal 99 Pro 1 299 Pro 2
forum & email

njob
v1.0
2009
Windows
free
email

NeoTextureEdit
v0.6.4
Nov. 2012
Linux, Windows & Mac
free
email

ShaderMap
v2.0.7
Aug. 2012
Windows
39.95
forum & email

Smart Normal
v1.0
??? 2008
Flash 10
free
email

[/TABLE]
** I never was able to get InsaneBump to run correctly with GIMP

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Update - added njob to table

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Thanks for the summary!

4

My pleasure :slight_smile:

If you’ve tried any of these apps and / or others, please let me know what you’re using and I’ll update the table.

It’s pretty interesting how difficult it is (at least for this noob) to try and get the same results from each app. The other thing that’s interesting / difficult is trying to match the best looking results (so far those being from CrazyBump) from scratch using only Photoshop plus any free filters; i.e., NVIDIA’s normal map plugin for PS.

5

Windows users: Be sure to check out Knald! GPU power makes this very fast and the user interface is quite clean and elegantly arranged.

This newcomer is presently in open beta meaning that you’re free to try it out.

6

Thanks for doing this Kelly! This is now one of the few threads here that I’ve got bookmarked!

7

Hi!
I can’t export with Knald. Is it a beta-limitation?
Looks like a really decent app. but need high-> low poly baking and it will be a real beast!

8

So…Did anybody ever get Insane Bump working in GNU/Linux?

9

Check this out:

(scroll down a bit for the updated version) for me it works mostly.
However it really only seems to run a series of standard GIMP filters if I am not completly mistaken, and thus can’t really get results compareable to a more advanced program with specialized algorithms.

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Thank you for this!