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.
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.).
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.
I’ve looked for crazybump, but it cost money and as a student i’m allways broke
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
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).