Crazy Bump

[philnolan3d]

Andrew, I wonder if you have considered incorporating something like CrazyBump into 3DC. I'm playing with the CB demo now and it's really fantastic at what it does, but what it does is not $300 worth of software. ShaderMap Pro was also pointed out to me that does similar work, but at a much lower price of $20. Some people are saying it's not as good though. The demo is too limited to tell so I'm going to have to buy it when I get some money in soon just to test it out. Anyway, either one compliments 3DC very nicely and it would be a grate feature to have built in.

[Skaven252]

It would be cool, sure, but you're talking about a pretty complex feature set for a program that isn't originally built for 2D painting on a flat canvas (though 3DC can handle it on picture planes). Can the 3DC team do all this work with their hands full? Extracting depth data from photos based on lighting ("shape from shading") involves a lot of trickery. Here's one interesting technique. They take two photos from the same surface, one with a flash and one without (only ambient light):

http://gizmodo.com/5042393/scientists-work...info-in-a-flash

But it only works on relatively flat surfaces that don't have much specularity.

And after all this, you'll still have to make the texture tile. The example video on CrazyBump site showed nothing about tiling. But PixPlant is pretty good at creating tiling textures out of photos. You could create a tiling texture with PixPlant first, then pass it on to CrazyBump. But oh yeah, that's yet another expensive program to buy.

[GED]

I think crazybump and shadermap are pretty good, Ive used crazybump and it gives really good results but honestly I dont see how this would fit into 3D coats feature set and might just bloat the software and make more work than is necessary at this point in time.

[kay_Eva]

if ur sculpting why use that?

[Skaven252]

if ur sculpting why use that?

It would be a handy way to produce workable Materials for sculpting. Sure, it is possible to paint fur or scales on a creature one by one, strand by strand, but in a hectic production environment you may be tempted to take a few shortcuts...

... but I agree with GED. It doesn't fit 3D-Coat's feature set in my opinion either.

[philnolan3d]

Well it was just a thought, that's why I didn't put it in Feature Requests. As for why, suppose you're working on a game and you have a dirt texture you want to apply. Easy enough in 3DC, now you want bump, yeah you could manually paint the roughness in but it would never match the color map exactly and would take a long time. Same with a brick wall, who wants to sit there detailing every little brick?

I was inspired to try it (CB) by this thread where it was used:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=444791

[GED]

Also I found crazybump to be useful on characters. You finish your character highpoly and sculpt and then bake the normal map to the lowpoly. Then you want to add small details that it would have been a pain to sculpt eg cloth materials, splattered dirt/mud, vector illustrated designs on the clothing etc etc then add all the generated normal maps to your character normal map in photoshop

[artman]

there is photo to normal tool in xnormals

and it's free

[GED]

there is photo to normal tool in xnormals

and it's free

yeah I use that plugin but its not as flexible as crazybump, I think its similar to the nvidia filter and you cant really easily get alot of 3d depth or the right amount of 3d depth like you can in crazybump

[Skaven252]

I just tried XNormal. It requires four photos (illuminated from left, right, above and below) to make normal maps from photos. Makes sense, but in practice I suppose it's quite hard to come up with such photos, especially if it's a large stone wall or such. Not everyone can carry a directional spotlight with a rig with them when taking texture photos.

[philnolan3d]

Not to mention a lot of people don't take their own texture photos and use sites like cgtextures.com .

[Maximus3D]

I been using ShaderMap Pro for quite some time now and i have to say for $20 it's definately worth it. Sure it haven't got all the features and functions that CrazyBump have got yet but the developer of ShaderMap is pretty easygoing and wanna improve the application to make it better so requesting new features is not a big problem. And coughing up $300 for CrazyBump is something i don't feel like doing when i get a program for the same price as a dinner at a restaurant then the choice is easy.

/ Magnus

[NinjaTaco]

I think this would fit well in 3d coat. Integrating it into the workflow is what would make it apart of 3d coat and not just a side application. It'd be nice to load up images, turn them into some kind of bump data and stamp it on the surface of your object.