I was told about the open source program Awesome Bump for generating maps. I am having a hard time following the silent tutorials produced by the author.
For instance I load in my texture map and it shows up in the 3D preview window and the 2D window fine. but when I select Normal, or the N button then the 2D window shows a checkerboard pattern with the Awesome Logo and this is imprinted onto my texture map in the 3D window.
It looks like this would be a wonderful program to use but there is almost no documentation and nothing for a beginner like myself to be able to follow along in baby steps.
Thanks for the super fast reply Roken. OK I loaded my image into the normal map and it shows up as a really heightened contrast of the original texture. But I still get squares on the 3D side if you look closely. So I am still lost.
Copy the diffuse image to every channel that you can. Toggle off the material channel. Then the checkerboard should go away. You can choose which maps to save in the “Output” tab.
Thanks Roku…and I found a recent video of a guy creating maps for a grass texture using awesome bump…so between watching that and going over the other silent vids by the author I will figure out how to use it. Thank you again for your patience and informative replies.
I had gotten annoyed with it, and shifted to a little bit simpler approach of using GIMP 2.8, which has an integrated choice for Insane Bump, under the Filters>Map choice. Just set the parameters and click Execute. Occasionally I will tweak the controls for individual images, but overall it does really well.
Thanks paulhart…i never used gimp before but installed and tried this. Seemed to try to work but I got many file save error messages after hitting the execute button. And it did not save any of the maps. So looks like it will have a slight learning curve for me. Thanks for your input.
I am feeding it ‘clean’ PNG files, single layer. I can always composite Layers later, but just to get the Normal/Bump/Diffuse, etc., is the first priority. Make sure that you have the ‘latest’ version of GIMP and that your video drivers are up to date also. Outdated video drivers cause more hassle than anybody realizes, as “everything” has to go through the video card to get to your screen.
Thanks paul…I will remember to flatten my png layers. As far as the drivers go I had to roll back my Nvidia to an earlier version as it was creating problems with Substance Painter 2.
Finalbarrage…if you have any advice or help with using Awesome Bump I would love to hear it. I will use the gimp method right now but I like that Awesome has the preview window and seems to have lots more variables to tweak.
I believe that Awesome has a gimp plugin version now, (I can’t vouch because I haven’t used it). TBH, I only use it for normal maps, and possibly specular anyway. And Gimp will do both. They do, however, create different normal maps.
I will look into that…thanks Roken. All I really need right now happens to be the Specular and Normal so that is perfect. Once i learn more and have more direct and complex needs of my renders in Blender I am sure I will learn about AO and all the other map types.
For anyone having this checkerboard problem, make sure you are running a proper graphics card with the app. Right click the shortcut on the desktop, and click run with graphics processor and pick the nvidia one in my own case and it works fine
