CrazyBump vs ShaderMap Pro vs ?

[sinbad]

Hi folk, I'm in the market for a good tool for generating normal / displacement / specular maps from photos, and so far the 2 main contenders appear to be CrazyBump and ShaderMap Pro. They're quite different in price, with CB coming in at $299, and SMP at a mere $19.99.

I've tested the demos from both, and by my eye CrazyBump significantly outperforms ShaderMap Pro in the files that I've thrown at it. CrazyBump in particular seems to preserve much more detail and offers more options for tweaking. Here's a quick example:

CrazyBump:


ShaderMap Pro:


Now, of course they're probably using slightly different shaders, but even just looking at the normal & displacement maps, CrazyBump has definitely preserved more detail. ShaderMap seems to have overly blurred the results, leading to a more plasticky feel even with this natural texture input (BeachStones.jpg from our media folder). I've tried playing with the settings in both, but CrazyBump consistently gives me better results.

Is it just me? Right now, I'm inclined to shell out the extra for CrazyBump, but I'd welcome some feedback from more experienced people on these or possibly other tools.

(If you're wondering why I'm suddenly doing this, it's because I need some nice textures with normal, displacement and specular maps for my new terrain texturing tests later).

[Kencho]

A friend of mine (works as an animator in a commercial movie) suggested me to try CB a month ago. Watched the tour and it certainly looks amazing and worth paying $299 if you're in the industry. However, as you say you only need the maps for testing purposes, I see CB a bit overkill. In the end is up to you (and of course you might find a lot more usages for the tool).

Just my 2 cents.

[sinbad]

Thanks. I will almost certainly use a tool like this to help me create content for commercial uses too, so the quality is important. The specific terrain work I'm doing has just triggered me to look, but I expect I'll use this to demo OgreSpeedTree and possibly other things in the future. So I'm willing to pay for something good (and Ogre will just get the benefit of me having it available to generate some nicer textures for future demos). I just wanted to check that it wasn't just me having this discrepancy between the 2 products, or that I hadn't overlooked another good option.

[mkultra333]

Perhaps ShaderMap Pro would produce better results if you start with higher resolution images and then scale down the final output maps. That might reduce the blurriness.

[xavier]

Is there a reason xNormal doesn't cut it?

http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

[jacmoe]

Thanks Xavier - I thought the same thing. But couldn't remember what the tool was called.
I believe Tuan Kuranes wrote an Ogre importer for it.

[Kentamanos]

Does xNormal do this? These apps appear to take nothing but a 2D bitmap as input and figure out how to create various maps from it.

xNormal is all about creating maps by using high and low res polys, right?

[Kencho]

Was about to say the same. The tools Sinbad was examining are about constructing bump, normals, reflectiveness, AO... from a single bitmap. xNormals seems to be a texture baking tool that takes a 3D scene/model and calculates the textures.

[xavier]

Correct, xNormal takes 3D models in several formats (I've used COLLADA before) and calculates several different types of map from it. I wasn't aware what the others did, I simply assumed they did the same.

[jacmoe]

Looking forward to seeing the results!

[Evak]

I like pixelplant 2 best

http://www.pixplant.com/

It's similar to Crazybump minus the AO. But has a much easier to use UI and a lot of handy 2D seamless texture gen tools with perspective and distortion correction and some other neat tricks..





I'm in the same boat as you but leaning towards PixPlant2

[jacmoe]

$175 is not bad for such a good editor.

[Kojack]

xNormal (I'm getting tired of things capitalising the second letter of their name, not the first) isn't just high to low mesh baking.
The tool section has photo to normal map generation, although it required 4 photos of the same thing lit from specific directions so it doesn't work too well on the ogre beachstones texture.
It also can generate cone maps, cavity maps, ambient occlusion maps and ambient cube maps.

[Vectrex]

although it required 4 photos of the same thing lit from specific directions

THAT sounds interesting, because the others can't possibly be accurate enough from one photo lit from a random angle.

repost from sinbads blog:
I say both are the devil and to get a wacom and hand paint the heightmap! Run that through the nvidia normalmap generator and bam, a *real* normalmap. But I guess you’re going to pull out the ‘but I’m just a poor programmer’ card
I constantly fight with our artist because he loves crazybump and I hate the rubbery, plastic, not quite right results of all 2d to 3d generators. I think he loves it because it’s so damn easy, but he normalmaps *everything* including flat signs

[xavier]

xNormal (I'm getting tired of things capitalising the second letter of their name, not the first) isn't just high to low mesh baking.

That's good to know too. I didn't get real deep with it because I'm *not* an aRtist (:P) so I didn't look too closely, just extracted my one map and moved on.

[sinbad]

I like xNormal, but it doesn't do the same thing as CrazyBump and ShaderMap Pro. Sure it's not *just* high-to-low mesh baking, but that *is* its primary focus. The need for 4 differently lit images to generate normal maps from is too awkward for me, however more accurate that may be. CrazyBump gives what I think are great looking normal maps with only one image, with lots of tweakables, which is what I want. I refute Vectrex's suggestion that CrazyBump gives rubbery / plasticky results - quite the opposite in my tests, that's why I like it. ShaderMap Pro however does tend to generate maps that look like 'vaccuum formed' plastic a lot of the time.

@Evak: thanks for the PixPlant suggestion, this was precisely the sort of feedback I was looking for. Will download & compare!

[sinbad]

Haha, and did you realise that PixPlant2 is using Ogre?

Maybe I can wangle a discount if I like it

[edit]Yeah, PixPlant2 is really nice. The quality output seems to be as good as CrazyBump, with the added benefit of tools to make photos tileable by auto-straightening and such. Nice tool! I'm going to approach the authors and say hi since they used OGRE (and credited us properly in their docs too).

[Zach Griffin]

I refute Vectrex's suggestion that CrazyBump gives rubbery / plasticky results - quite the opposite in my tests, that's why I like it.

As do I!

[sinbad]

So, conclusion: I've been impressed by PixPlant, the normal/height/specular map generation is very good, and it seems to help a great deal with making textures tileable. The fact that it uses Ogre too, and is cheaper than CrazyBump while seemingly doing just as good a job (plus more, barring AO generation), all goes in its favour.

I would have been happy to buy it, but PixPlant have offered me a complimentary copy given the Ogre relationship, so that makes the decision even easier! I'd hoped for perhaps a discount, but free is even better

Thanks for the referral Evak, this all turned out surprisingly well!

[Kojack]

and it seems to help a great deal with making textures tileable

The best texture tiling system I've seen is Luxology's Image Synth 2
http://www.luxology.com/whatismodo/imageSynth
Damn cool program.

[Evak]

Heh cool that it used ogre, I had no idea . And glad I could help

[RSI]

It looks like you’ve got the specular level turned up really high on ShaderMap. The sphere looks like it's coated in plastic . You should probably decrease the brightness of your specular map. Also I’m guessing that you are using the demo version of SMP which limits your preview resolution (and thus your detail).

Here are some screens of ShaderMap Pro creating normal maps from stones.

ShaderMap Stones with Diffuse.

ShaderMap Stones without Diffuse.

You can see ShaderMap is quite good at picking up the detail from images.



Plus... it's only $19.95!

[sinbad]

I did experiment with all the settings in both systems, and ShaderMap always came up with muddier results regardless of specular level. My guess is that the difference was that the demo was limited in resolution then, in which case my main recommendation to you is to abandon that limit, because it just gives the impression when demoing that ShaderMap Pro’s results are inferior. Maybe you should just watermark or something instead?

In the end it was all moot for me because I ended up getting a free copy of PixPlant2, because it uses Ogre (which I wrote),and I’m very happy with its results.