Shader map 4 or Bitmap2Material

Hi all!

This is my first post here after looking around and mostly reading I decided to ask something I am doubting about.

I want to turn some photographs into good quality normal maps and am doubting between two programs. I found crazybump to be on the expensive side so I am looking at Shader map 4 and Bitmap2Material.

Bitmap2Material seems to be the most used but if i look at shader map 4 it seems more feature rich especially for its price. Do any of you have postive or negative experiences with either of them?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

You can try awesomebump for free and see if that works well enough for you. There’s also a gimp plugin called insanebump you could look at. You’re going to have to tweak settings and figure out how to use it.

You can also use https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/

I have used all three of them before to get the desired results, though I prefer AwesomeBump personally.

I am a the same point. I am constantly in and out of Photoshop when I am working on textures. I miss the ease of copying and pasting height/normal maps found in Crazybump. From what I have determined neither of these package have this workflow convenience. Shadermap developer did give me a immediate response when I found a bug so that’s a plus.

I am still using Gimp for bump and normals from images I have taken by camera and seems to work pretty well. Just takes a little tweaking to set up the proper color settings to create a nice bump/normal map in Gimp. CrazyBump is nice cause one click and you can get all the texture maps converted at once vs in Gimp it is one by one that you need to create. And I am not positive but I believe CrazyBump also automatically makes the textures seamless which Gimp doesn’t do unless you make it seamless for each texture.

Thanks for all the replies!

Interesting to see that there are others experiencing the same problems I have. The main issue I have with shadermap is that there is so little info to find about it (reviews and such). The gimp and photoshop plugin seem to have less options than the ones in shadermap and bitmap2material. I personally don’t like gimp(interface wise) that much but I might give it a try just for this. I use Affinity products instead of photoshop and illustrator.

I am always a bit paranoid when installing software that doesn’t have much reviews and info from users such as shadermap although it does look like a legit tool especially version 4. The developer actively responding is nice to hear!

Does anyone know how the “proper” normal maps are created of trees and such? are they photoscanned or how do they make them?

I have Shadermap 3, I find it very good, but not exactly intuitive. That said, it does the job effectively.

Hi Colkai,

Thanks for your input, good to hear from some people who tried it out! After I finish playing around in bitmap2material demo I’ll checkout shader map to see which one I like more :). Do you have any renders of textures you did with shadermap?