What is Reddit's opinion of Crazybump?

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I do animation in my free time and every now and then I need to create my own bump maps for my projects. Bump mapping is extremely easy because there is software that can do it for you. I've used a program called Crazy bump in the past and I recommend it since you can import your texture and generate a bump map easily and also edit the bump map to have more dept or be smooth. There is also a plugin for Gimp that can generate bump maps but, I have not used it before.

CrazyBump! http://www.crazybump.com/ It is the most incredible piece of software, you can make bump maps out of any image as well as displacement maps, specular maps etc. I used it for some space landscape shots with images from NASA's photojournal, it looks incredible. Its so friggin easy.

EDIT: Upon closer inspection, this may not answer the question, but its useful anyway :p

Use this: http://www.crazybump.com/

and refer to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07H7xeUnGE

Its a blender tutorial, but the same principles apply to all packages and the process should be easy to replicate in c4d at your level.

1. Download CrazyBump
2. Open your heightmap file within that program
3. Mess around with the settings until you like it (view the 3D preview to check it out before you're done!)
4. Save it as world_normal.bmp (of course)
5. Make sure it's the same resolution as the original world_normal.bmp (2816x1024)
6. Profit

Unless you can get your hands on the original, non-tessellated model to rescuplt in zbrush/mudbox, you'll have to paint those details in yourself onto a grayscale layer in photoshop. It takes a lot of practice to create believable creases and wrinkles, but it's worth the effort.

Use something like Crazy Bump to convert it into a normal.

Of course! And if you don't happen to be fluent in photoshop or gimp (I'm definitely not), Crazy Bump is a cool program that can convert maps into normal, spec, and bump maps. Check it out!

Seconded, it would be good to see a tutorial or guide for this. I remember using Crazybump to generate normal maps for 2D images a few years back, they are usually pretty good but they can leave a bit to be desired: http://www.crazybump.com/

> I've tried awesomebump but crazybump makes it seem inadequate.

Genuinely curious, why do you think so? I've used AwesomeBump for a while now and haven't gotten anything but great maps out of it.

...and I can really only attest to what /u/Multicorn said. In most cases, even serious tweaking in CrazyBump (or whatever else you use) won't result in a great map. You'll have to either generate the missing information yourself using e.g. blender, Photoshop or use sub par (albeit quickly generated) maps.

Also, just to make sure, did you try writing to the email at the bottom of the CrazyBump page? Can't hurt to do that before you drop $99.

As for xNormal... it's pretty decent as well, it's just that it's primarily a baking tool. On top of that, the application looks and feels like something from the mid-90s. It's good to have it installed (again, mostly for baking), but I wouldn't recommend it as your go-to maps generator. It comes with some very nice Photoshop plugins, though, so that's nice.

In my opinion, you don't need dedicated maps 100% of the time. You can get 98% of what you need off of CGtextures and be just dandy, especially if you get a premium account there (access to the higher resolution stuff!). I run most of my stuff as just "pictures" through CrazyBump -- http://www.crazybump.com/ super easy to use, and pretty cheap. I'm also a huge fan of being able to use height maps to generate all of the textures with exception for the diffuse. This means that I derive my information from a height map, which results in more accurate normals, which makes a high quality normal/spec. When deriving from just a photo, you get a lot of needless noise or shadow/light information that can mess up the data that you're trying to extract for your normal map.

This process isn't entirely intuitive and can take many months to get good at understanding the language/process. Everyone works differently, everyone learns differently, but when you realize you're only dealing with pixels and maths, it gets a little more manageable.

Here's a link to my CN Tower scene files. I've included my PSD so you can kinda see how I work in layers. You'll need photoshop to open it, I believe.

I would recommend Crazy Bump. It's free and you can use it to generate bump maps, normal maps and specularity maps. For a tutorial, here's one by Andrew Price, using Crazy Bump.

yes this is possible, it's best to use images that are designed specifically to drive displacement but you can use any image. the displacement will use the vibrance or brightness value of each pixel to assign height information.

if you want a piece of cheap software that can quickly to a photo and create a height map from it, try crazybump http://www.crazybump.com/ . if you have any of the substance suite programs, they are better suited to this but crazybump get's adequate results very, very fast.

here's what crazybump can do with a random image i grabbed from a google search (https://imgur.com/a/o9hEmgU)

you also need to make sure that you have enough geometry on your cube to displace it correctly. that is a key difference between displacement and normal maps, displacement actually requires geometry.

Crazy bump is a great normal map generator http://www.crazybump.com for texture painting you can use blender 3d as well. Both of them are free. Also there is paid software as substance painter which is awesome and so.

No single piece of software can do this. There are 3D modelling tools that can generate bump maps from images, like CrazyBump and AwesomeBump. They're not fully automatic, they need the user to make decisions on how to interpret the image.

Go through the process and choose the output version called "bump map" or "height map". You can them apply that to a high density plane in 3D modelling software such as Blender, extrude the outer edges down to create a flat bottom surface, and export and STL for slicing.

Have you used a texture to create the bricks, have you modeled and extruded them manually, or are they procedural? I personally would use a texture to color the bricks. Then, in an image editor(gimp/photoshop), create a black and white displacement map to separate the bricks from the mortar and save it as a separate image. I'd link this to the displacement node. I'd experiment with mixing the displacement map with a noise texture node for some variation. I'd mix in another noise node that passes through a brightness contrast node (or a color ramp node that has a sharper falloff from white to black) for the holes, scratches, pores of the bricks. Increasing the contrast will make the holes seem deeper and less smooth. Right now your bricks are all very uniform in the way that they are extruded from the surface, and their edges are very sharp.

Additionally, have you ever heard of an external, 3rd party program called 'CrazyBump'? I heard about it from Blender Guru 's tutorial entitled, "The Secrets of Realistic Texturing". The program lets you import a texture image, and from that image, generate a normal map, a bump map, and even a specular map (to determine what is glossy and what isn't). The process involves you moving sliders around until you get the desired level of detail. The process isn't exactly perfect, because only so much bump information can be extracted from a 2d texture, however it is very useful. The free version of this program doesn't let you export at the highest resolution, but again, is still very useful.

You might want to take a look at CG Textures, the textures there are free. But they might not always have a normal map. I usually used Crazy Bump to convert the diffuse to a normal, there are many things you can do with Crazy Bump as well. You might also want to take a look at Quixel they've got a bunch of awesome stuff for texturing.

Good, but the the fresnel effect affect everything, so maybe try something like this.
I see bump on the floor, but something is weird about it, you should try CrazyBump.
I think the mask wouldn't be so thin in real life, a solidify modifier could be good on it perhaps.
I don't see any other problem, good work.

You can try using Crazy Bump to create normal and displacement maps from the texture images. Andrew Price does a decent walkthrough of the software here.

Idk how you made the normals but try out the nvidia plugin for Photoshop:

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

it saved me a lot of time. (It's OK at best but it gets the job done)

Crazybump is amazing, though it's paid. http://www.crazybump.com/

Edit: woods my favorite! Also I like the cracks on the wall too, pretty good job!

I think a displacement modifier as Clasm said will help a lot. Your cookie image has well defined areas of dark and light, because of the chocolate chips, so it should be able to give some different geometry. Look for a tutorial on youtube, but here briefly is how you go about adding a displacement modifier:

First you will need a displacement map, which you can generate using a few different programmes. There is I think a 30 day free trial for Crazybump which is a really good program to easily get all of your maps from. Alternatively GIMP has an add-on which (if I remember correctly) is called insanebump. Once you have your displacement map, using the sub-divide to create more faces on your cookies (probably use about 20 cuts).

Having done that you can then go ahead and create a texture for your cookie using the texture map you generated. This is needed because now when you go to add the displacement modifier to your cookie, you can choose the texture from the drop down menu. Once you add that you should see your cookie go very spiky... to get the effect you want, just reduce the strength to something that looks normal. You will probably then want to add a sub division surface modifier to smooth it out.

Doing it this way will save you from having to sculpt...

>I run most of my stuff as just "pictures" through CrazyBump -- http://www.crazybump.com/ super easy to use, and pretty cheap. I'm also a huge fan of being able to use height maps to generate all of the textures with exception for the diffuse. This means that I derive my information from a height map, which results in more accurate normals, which makes a high quality normal/spec. When deriving from just a photo, you get a lot of needless noise or shadow/light information that can mess up the data that you're trying to extract for your normal map

Awesome! That's partially what I've been conflicted with and I think you basically answered my question of, "do you use normal maps AND diffuse maps in conjunction most of the time on models, even simple ones?"

This cleared up some of my confusion. I thought to myself after closely reviewing some of your fantastic models, "how in the eff did these textures come out so well?", other than being an expert/professional, and started to look into all kinds of normal map tut's to try and figure out if that would make my textures stand out more.

> Everyone works differently, everyone learns differently, but when you realize you're only dealing with pixels and maths, it gets a little more manageable.

Thanks for the tips! I already reviewed - in profuse detail how you scaled and arranged your diffuse map for the CN tower linked earlier from the release on the workshop. :)

>Here's a link to my CN Tower scene files. I've included my PSD so you can kinda see how I work in layers. You'll need photoshop to open it, I believe.

You're the greatest. I'm going to study the shit out of these. :D Thanks again /u/justifications! There's a handful of you guys out there that are really helping me out and I do appreciate the time you guys spend on showing a novice some very basic aspects of what you guys do so well.

What programs outside of the engine do you frequently use when working with materials, and what is the general process when creating them

(e.g. CrazyBump)

Second Question, Sort of engine realted.

Any plans for a replay / demo system? More and more games leave this out as time goes on and there are so many things it's good for. As someone who makes a lot of frag videos it's great for that. It's also good for tracking down / reporting cheaters, competitive games and more. If a system is planned, any details on it? Some kind of scripted camera movement like RypleCam would be amazing

You need to download GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

After that you need to add the Plugin Insane Bump: http://registry.gimp.org/node/28117

If you want you could also download Crazybump: http://www.crazybump.com/

Crazybump is a standalone program. However it costs money. But you could get the timed trial for now if you just want things fast.

Hi Sevvy, hope I can explain this properly. I downloaded a seamless ground texture from Google and then ran it through Crazybump to get a normal map.

Here's a pic of my nodes for the ground. With just the image and normal I didnt like the regularity, there was pattern because of the scale, so I added the noise texture, the scale of the noise texture is so large because my ground plane is so big. I added the bright/contrast so I could adjust how dark the patches were. I was just playing with a similar setup on another picture using a colour ramp so I could make a mottled parchment effect. Hope this helps.

well, one thigni do to get really good materials is:

1) I make a loopable texture by going into photoshop and using the offset effect(filters>other>offset) to offset my texture and then fix any seams by using the clone stamp tool.

2) i bring the loopable texture into Crazybump(if you dont have crazybump... you crazy. lol, its a great program and the Mac beta is free!)

3) save out specular, normal, color, diffuse, and whatever textures you think you might need from crazybump.

4) import these textures into a c4D material being careful to place the textures in the right channels.

5) lighting and reflections are going to be CRUCIAL for amking your render look real. try to watch some lighting tutoirals(the program is pretty much irrelevant for this because lighting concepts apply across any 3D package pretty much the same).

those are my suggestions! lets see where you end up!

crazybump