Sure Max and Maya can render shadow and specular maps to texture, but not with the ease of use of this thing. This is a middleware tool that fills an old art pipeline void very, very well. And CrazyBump has sliders to allow you to adjust your maps that actually have words that make sense. Simple Normal Mapper is written in Qt and C++. Simple Normal Mapper is fully automatic with some user-controllable parameters. Normal mapping is used, for example, in 2D games to make an illusion of a 3D object. No art tool should ever have a preview so terrible. Simple Normal Mapper is a normal map editor with which one can easily create normal maps for 2D images. I'm going to uninstall the Nvidia plugin today, burn in to a CD, and drive over it with my car. I will never open the Nvidia plugin again. I loaded the normal map into CrazyBump, and also loaded my model into CrazyBump to view my work, and exported a specular map, and ambient occlusion map to bake into the diffuse texture, which really helped accentuate the scales on this guy: The only problem I have is that the ONLY normal map plugin on the web doesnt actually work (On any of this years Paint.NETs) So I have to make the normal maps in the Gimp2. For instance, I created a dinosaur model in Zbrush and exported the normal map. of 2 - Normal Map Creation - posted in Paint.NET: I love using Paint.NET Its my main tool when doing any textures and I dont need any transparency. Yep, you can start with either diffuse or normal maps. Now go to the render panel, in the bake section : choose bake type 'Normal', and click 'bake'.
The result image (on the right) is added and selected in order to be baked to.
It's a free (edit: for now) utility that not only replaces the horrible old Nvidia Photoshop filter for turning color maps into normal maps, but also creates specular, "fake" ambient occlusion, and parallax maps from either a diffuse map or a normal map. add a material to it, like this in the node editor, from left to right : UV input node, your source image, a bump map vector, connected to the displacement of the material. I'm totally in love with this program called CrazyBump. They can enhance the optical illusion of depth significantly andĪre especially useful on flat surfaces, that have several bumps orĪs shown on the right, the elevation described by the height map can be converted to a normal map, that can be read from your graphics card inside the shader units.This has been mentioned a couple of times in the forums, but I just wanted to put my two cents in. These colors are representing the direction of the normal vector. They don't change the structure of the model and have nearly no impact on performance.Įach pixel represents a normal vector and is composed of three colors. This is referenced in the Material VMT file (which you will need for each texture anyway). Normal maps, on the other hand, are stored in a separate texture. Normal Maps are textures that inherit depth information of a surface. Specular maps from Crazybump are used by the engine as envmapmasks.
A normal map uses RGB information that corresponds to the X, Y and Z axis in 3D space. But Normal maps do it in a different way. They also allow you to fake the illusion of depth and detail on a 3D object without actually adding any 3D geometry. It can also project the texture of the highpoly model into the. I dont think Crazy Bump is for converting a bump map to a normal map, its for creating bump/normal/diffuse etc. Normal Maps are very similar to bump maps. But for normals/height maps/displacement I swear by nDO. It is possible to do it with Crazy Bump (you need to flip it in Y to make it compatible with Blender), i want to reproduce the result in Blender.
But I still create most other maps by hand, because reflection/glossy maps need to be pretty bespoke for architectural materials. But there simply isnt any better normal map creator at all. If you have further questions, just give feedback to the mail-adress on the webpage. xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps. Its suited primarily for games/real-time, but so is CrazyBump after all, but much more crude. The preview window shows a 3D-model with several different maps.Įach map can be enabled/disabled and the preview model can be adjusted.
Just drag & drop a heightmap in the specified field and adjust settings.Īfterwards check the preview window and download your own normalmap.Īdditionally you can adjust and download displacement and ambient occlusion maps Textures are not saved on the server and all scripts are running on your Browser. This website lets you create normal maps from height maps for free.Īll normal map textures you create are your own.