Knald - Master Thread
interpolator
Knald 1.2.1 Released!
New build ahoy! Since the 1.2.0 release of Knald we have been hard at work fixing a few bugs and adding a few miscellaneous under the hood improvements. Time for the Knald 1.2.1 Hotfix release!
Go to page 12 for details!
We are happy to announce the Knald 1.2.0 has been officially released & is a free update for Knald 1.0 customers!
The 1.2 release is huge with massive upgrades to the mesh loading system (read below for details), including support for baking Bent Normals, support for the Stanford .PLY file format, additional options for occluder weighting for Ambient Occlusion, support for unnormalized height maps in the Baker, a new light theme and more!
We are happy to announce the Knald 1.1.0 has been officially released & is a free update for Knald 1.0 customers!
For 1.1 we have added many new features including:
A new next generation baker with:
Along with
More Information on page 13!
After a long public beta we have finally arrived and the wait is over! Knald 1.0 has been released!
We would like to truly thank everyone for all their hard work & dedication in helping us make Knald the best that it can be.
Going forward our journey will continue to update and improve Knald, so please feel free to keep offering us your suggestions & giving us your valuable feedback. We couldn't have done this without you!
You can now view pricing & purchase Knald HERE
We also have a 30 day trial version that is available for people to test system compatibility and other such workflow considerations.
Thanks again for all the support everyone!
Enjoy!
What is Knald?
Knald is an ultra-fast GPU powered solution for generating bake quality textures from any 2D source texture.
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 modern mid-range GPU. When loading an existing 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.
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 and AMD cards currently supported) If your graphics card supports OpenCL then you are good to go!
What does Knald mean for artists?
Feedback and Support
We strive to make Knald the best that it can be, so please feel free to keep offering us your suggestions & giving us your valuable feedback on things such as bug reports and anything else that you feel could be improved within Knald.
You can also email us at support@knaldtech.com with any questions that you may have.
Artwork
We love seeing art that has Knald has helped create so please feel free to post your work in this thread so we can view it in all of its glory.
Social Media
Knald Technologies is now on Facebook, Twitter & Google+! Like us on Facebook Here, add us on Twitter Here & +1 us on Google+ Here.
New build ahoy! Since the 1.2.0 release of Knald we have been hard at work fixing a few bugs and adding a few miscellaneous under the hood improvements. Time for the Knald 1.2.1 Hotfix release!
Go to page 12 for details!
We are happy to announce the Knald 1.2.0 has been officially released & is a free update for Knald 1.0 customers!
The 1.2 release is huge with massive upgrades to the mesh loading system (read below for details), including support for baking Bent Normals, support for the Stanford .PLY file format, additional options for occluder weighting for Ambient Occlusion, support for unnormalized height maps in the Baker, a new light theme and more!
- Added support for Tangent & Object Space Bent Normal Maps in the Baker with various options to control occluder weighting (Cosine, Uniform Clamped & Uniform Unclamped) and how the magnitude is stored via normalization.
- Improved the mesh loader to support mesh files with a triangle count of 350 million.
- Improved mesh loading speeds by up to 550%.
- Improved the mesh loader to support user adjustable bake balancing, which balances execution time between High Poly processing (import) and baking time based upon a slider value.
- Improved the mesh loader to support mesh files over 4GB in size.
- Added support for .ply Polygon File Format/Stanford Triangle Format.
- Added support for unnormalized height maps in the Baker.
- Added support for various options to control occluder weighting for baked Ambient Occlusion (Cosine, Uniform Clamped & Uniform Unclamped).
- Added support for various options to control occluder weighting for Mesh Ambient Occlusion (Cosine, Uniform Clamped & Uniform Unclamped).
- Added support for the reporting of various statistics for Height Maps in the Baker on (Min, Mid & Max for both normalized & unnormalized).
- Add support for the display of high poly vertex & triangle counts in the status bar while the Baker is loaded.
- Updated .kpbr with new presets (Brass #2, Rhodium, Tin, Tungsten + Concrete 1+2).
- Added an the option to use a cube primitive in the 3d preview.
- Added new Light theme for Knald via a dropdown option in the Preferences Tab.
- Added support for relative paths when saving/loading .ksf files.
- Added support for palletized PNG files.
- Added support for collapsible groups in the 3d preview.
- Updated the Dark theme so that ghosted/disabled GUI items are lighter for better legibility.
- Miscellaneous improvements to the load/save system.
- Miscellaneous tweaks to .kpbr to improve preview material aesthetics.
- Updated tooltips.
- Miscellaneous improvements and optimizations.
We are happy to announce the Knald 1.1.0 has been officially released & is a free update for Knald 1.0 customers!
For 1.1 we have added many new features including:
A new next generation baker with:
- 8k support
- 16xAA
- Non-topologically Matching Cages
- Simultaneous Vertex Color, Derivative, Height & Tangent/Object Space Normal Baking
- Interactive Ambient Occlusion & Transmission Baking
- Fast, High Poly Mesh Based Curvature (Single & Dual Channel)
- Instant 100% Dilation/Bleed
- Fast & Intuitive Mesh Loading with NGon Support
- Post Bake Normal Strength Scaling
- Custom FBX Tangent Space Support
- Savable User Settings
Along with
- A significantly upgraded 3d preview with all new IBL & PBR support with Metal & Smoothness workflow, MSAA & MikkTSpace
- SupportCurvature maps in Integrator mode
- Support for copy/paste
- Plus lots more!
More Information on page 13!
After a long public beta we have finally arrived and the wait is over! Knald 1.0 has been released!
We would like to truly thank everyone for all their hard work & dedication in helping us make Knald the best that it can be.
Going forward our journey will continue to update and improve Knald, so please feel free to keep offering us your suggestions & giving us your valuable feedback. We couldn't have done this without you!
You can now view pricing & purchase Knald HERE
We also have a 30 day trial version that is available for people to test system compatibility and other such workflow considerations.
Thanks again for all the support everyone!
Enjoy!
What is Knald?
Knald is an ultra-fast GPU powered solution for generating bake quality textures from any 2D source texture.
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 modern mid-range GPU. When loading an existing 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.
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 and AMD cards currently supported) If your graphics card supports OpenCL then you are good to go!
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.
Feedback and Support
We strive to make Knald the best that it can be, so please feel free to keep offering us your suggestions & giving us your valuable feedback on things such as bug reports and anything else that you feel could be improved within Knald.
You can also email us at support@knaldtech.com with any questions that you may have.
Artwork
We love seeing art that has Knald has helped create so please feel free to post your work in this thread so we can view it in all of its glory.
Social Media
Knald Technologies is now on Facebook, Twitter & Google+! Like us on Facebook Here, add us on Twitter Here & +1 us on Google+ Here.
Replies
Congratulations on the launch, guys! Have been a regular user of the beta and Knald has proven indispensable. Can't wait to get me a full copy.
We can't tell you all how much we appreciate your support
@wednesdays02, The Mac version is still in the pipes. Hopefully won't be too long.
@cccprobot, Either is fine
In short, Knald is great but not priced in a competitive way that might help it compete with the large assortment of other offerings that have been popping up as of late. Regardless, I hope its a success because quite frankly, I think you have earned it.
Congrats!
I might be a special case for using Knald, but the fact that it's GPU accelerated puts it in a different league from any competition. The time saved with Knald's lightning fast bakes will continue to pay dividends for years. I'll be telling everyone I know about it.
Good work guys, you should be proud!
$100 for an individual license, really is cheap. i would have bought it even if it was $200.
you could easily save $100 by skipping few trips to the bar, just have to set your priorities right.
hmm I may have to take back what I said earlier then. I must not have seen the fine print as it made it seem the only version that could be used commercially was the $200 one. If at $100 the individual license allows for the individual(s) to make some revenue from their assets, then that is indeed priced competitively.
Yup, you can indeed do for-profit work with the individual license.
The limitation is that to qualify for the individual license the license must be licensed to a person directly or licensed to a company with only one owner/employee/etc and the licensee must own the machine(s) that it is used on.
So if you work for yourself and are doing work on your own machines you are in the clear - Studios and contractors using studio equipment must use the Studio license, etc.
Thanks!
Chris Gilbert
Knald Technologies, LLC
It's a awesome tool.
That would be perfectly fine! Just make sure to register it yourself and not through the studio.
Also all licenses of Knald allow for two simultaneous activations (eg: laptop and workstation) provided it is only the Licensee using it on both machines.
Thanks!
Chris Gilbert
Knald Technologies, LLC
I would primarily like to use Knald for colour to normal map generation and I have a couple feature requests regarding that functionality. I am more than happy to purchase a license in advance if these are features you would consider adding to the tool. Let me know.
1. Could you add more zoom increments it's hard to look at my normal map in the 3D preview right now because I am locked to large zoom increments which are either too far away or too close.
2. Could you add a colour to normal map layering system where I can stack multiple normal maps on top of each other and have each layer be a realtime tweakable colour to normal node. Also could you support a transparency slider for each layer, and the ability to blend them with overlay mode.
3. Could you make the workflow non destructive so I can save all my layers (if you add them) and all their settings in a scene format file with all the multiple colour to normal images still plugged in so if I need to tweak the maps again I could come back later and update some of the colour images without having to tweak any settings again or relayer things
4. Could you add load from clipboard as an option rather than having to browse for files.
Hi Malcom,
Thanks for the kind words!
It's awesome to hear that you are finding Knald to be so useful & intuitive.
There are currently two types of zoom within Knald - A coarse zoom, which you are already using & a fine zoom which is a smooth continuous movement. The hotkey for the fine zoom is Alt+Left mouse button drag. Let me know if that is what you are looking for
Do you mean normal map mixing where the inputs are regular normal maps or a stack of colour to normal as it is now where we would have a bunch of colour to normal sliders for each map?
Thanks for the suggestion! I will see what I can do for a future update.
This is already on the list for a future update. Stay tuned
2. A stack of colour to normal with real time sliders for tweaking each separately. I often find I will export 3 greyscale images at least, then convert them to normal maps in Knald one at a time, then composite them in Photoshop to create final single map. Would be great if I could do this directly in the tool and see the preview in the 3D view. CrazyBump had this functionality, but it was a destructive workflow so once you closed the tool all your tweaks and layers were lost.
3. I think there is a market for fast creation of colour to normal maps with non destructive editing. I am finding nDo2 to be awesome, but I have a super computer at work 32 threads 4gig vram, but with a 2048x2048 colour to normal nDo2 is still painfully slow to tweak a couple layers so I am hoping Knald can fill this void. You already have the speed (faster than CrazyBump, also better looking maps) now it just needs the stacking/layers functionality and some way to save the session so I can come back to it later and continue tweaking my normal map, even change the input textures for the layers.
As promised I will go and purchase a personal license right now.
Knald produced this 4096x4096 map @1024 rays in 7 SECONDS! Incredible...
Yea, there is a limit to how far you can zoom in. We could look at allowing more freedom in this regard in the future if people think it is needed.
Ok, cool. Thanks for the information! I will see what I can do
Awesome, thanks for your custom!
Looks great! It's amazing to see people liking Knald so much. Thanks for posting
Thank your such an awesome app with incredible speed.
Right now I take my Concavity and Convexity into photoshop and Multiply and Add them on top of a 50% gray background. Would just save some time is all. I realize it's to give more flexibility by splitting them into two inputs, but a lot of the actions and materials I have expect curvature to be formatted like that. Also when doing 3D painting less layers saves a lot of memory.
I'd also love to see some more preview tools. Like the ability to overlay AO, concavity, and convexity on the Lighting preview mode. A lot easier to preview your results that way rather than seeing the maps in isolation. Should be as simple as having a checkbox and an opacity slider in the previewer side bar.
Also, the ability to use them in the spec map would be great as well! Maybe even a Spec tab for proper compositing could be feasible?
Thanks for the comments Fingus. I will see what I can do and add them to my list.
Cheers, malcom. Great ideas as always!
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76488
Basically it looks like I'm getting a 2 pixel bevel when I would like to get a 1 pixel bevel like CrazyBump gives me. I'm using a simple light grey dark grey checker image to generate the map. Images below, zoom in to see the difference.
I couldn't zoom the image. Could you upload a larger version please? Also the source file would be great too
Cheers!
1) A preferences checkbox to ignore the Export Path and automatically dump out maps in the same directory your initial map was loaded from. This way users don't have to manually change the export path if they work in sub-directories.
2) An option to strip a user defined file suffix off before appending Knald's own suffix. Right now, I already bake my normal maps with a _N suffix. When I export from Knald, I get files named RadAsset_N, RadAsset_N_AO, RadAsset_N_H, etc. Maybe the user can define a string like, "_N" that Knald ignores. Or better yet, the user can select an ASCII character like an underscore so that all characters post underscore get stripped.
I know these seem small, but I think they could really help eliminate some small annoyances.
Awesome, thanks!
Hopefully neither of these will be a problem to add. I will stick them on the list and see if I can get them implemented.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Thanks
A typical workflow for this would be to add UVs to the lowest subdivision when sculpting and then import the HP mesh into Knald for baking and then use the lowest subdivision as your game res mesh. You could also reproject a sculpt onto a game res mesh and do it that way too.
Hope that helps!