Introducing Knald - Open Beta!

Edit *Now that Knald is no longer in Beta please use THIS thread for all future posts regarding Knald goodies.*


Hi everyone!

For the past year the Knald team has been busy working on a new application that helps artists create great textures. We are proud to announce the open beta of Knald - The world's first GPU powered solution for generating "bake quality" textures from any 2D source texture.

Multi-vendor GPU Support!
By harnessing the power of OpenCL™, Knald is a cross hardware platform solution and therefore is not limited to any specific GPU vendor. (NVIDIA or AMD cards are currently supported) If your graphics card supports OpenCL™ then you are good to go!



How fast is ultra fast?
Knald can generate a Normal, Derivative, Displacement/Height, Ambient Occlusion, Concavity and Convexity maps in around 5 seconds on a mid level Nvidia 560Ti. When loading a Heightmap directly, all other maps are generated instantly and automatically.



Real-time?
Once you integrate your source texture, all the controls in Knald are real-time, meaning that you can iterate quickly and control the exact look & feel of your textures without waiting for your PC to bake and catch up with you.



What does Knald mean for artists?

• Versatile work flow – Artists can import and work with Normal, Derivative, Heightmaps and photo-sourced textures.
• All calculations & processing are performed in double/single precision floating point (float64/float32).
• Pixel perfect 8, 16 and 32bit support - Our file I/O and image processing pipeline preserves your high precision data.
• Best in class Heightmaps – Excellent quality, accurate height maps generated from a Normal/Derivative or photo-sourced texture.
• Best in class real-time AO – Extremely high quality and clean results rivaling baked AO at 600+ rays.
• Ultra fast results – Real time AO, Concavity and Convexity map generation adjustment means no more waiting for bakes.
• Simultaneous map processing – See and adjust the results of all maps instantly.
• Real time (scalable) tessellation in the 3D preview – See what your heightmap looks like before importing it into an engine.

Character art by Gavin Goulden



Image courtesy of Dan Roarty


Image courtesy of Warren Boonzaaier


Image courtesy of Andy Davies

We would love for you to try out Knald and hear what you think! You can download the open beta from HERE and find our tutorial video HERE. Please post any questions, feature requests, or bug reports you might have in this thread or on the open beta forums over at Eat3d

Enjoy!

Kind regards,
The Knald team.


Edit *Now that Knald is no longer in Beta please use THIS thread for all future posts regarding Knald goodies.*