Bitmap2Material & Grunge Maps Toolkit

Mark Dygert

Jeremie "Jerc" Noguer let us know about two tools, Bitmap2Material & Grunge Maps Toolkit

If you're not familiar with Substance materials you should take a min or two to look them over. I covered them briefly in our 3dsmax 2012 whats new feature.

These tools work in tandem with Substance to provide you great ways to create tillable, changeable somewhat procedural materials.

"Bitmap2Material" acts a lot like Crazybump, generating normal maps, specular maps and such from a simple diffuse map, as well as adding automatic tiling and randomizing options directly in 3dsMax and Maya 2012.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmWFZiQUees

Bitmap2Material: http://www.allegorithmic.com/substances/library/substance-bitmap2material


Next up is the "Grunge Maps Toolkit" is a procedural grunge maps/ brushes generator allowing artists to generate thousands of dirt and grunge maps at any resolution for texturing and sculpting. It's entirely based on procedural noises, so you can generate as many randomized variations as you like.

- Add an old&dirty effect to your textures
- Blend two materials or textures progressively directly in 3DS Max or Maya
- Generate hundreds of grunge brushes in seconds for your 2D editing software
- Use these substances in Substance Designer!

Grunge Maps Toolkit: http://www.allegorithmic.com/substances/library/substance-grunge-maps-toolkit-volume-1

 

The only downside is they aren't free, but they do offer some pretty hefty discounts (50% off) on some of their tools to people on subscription with Autodesk. These tools and their others are really worth checking out.

It also sounds like they're open to suggestions and ideas so if you have any send them in.

barnesy

That looks awesome , ashame about the price though :O

mdeforge

It's not too expensive to be honest. It's cheaper than the professional version of Crazy Bump, and only $50 more than the personal version. I welcome new tools as they come. Because I already own Crazy Bump, I can't say I'll be buying this, but it's something to keep an eye on.

Moosey_G

Looks awesome, but after a test trial it seems that, perhaps it's just me, wonky. It's offset and splat features don't really work with anything but stoneface. The specular maps don't really come out the way you want it to and the substance editor just has a 0-1 scale like you're manually editing levels in photoshop, but even after that it still comes out odd, and doesn't allow for specular's containing colours other than white.

It took a while to figure out how to get the normals to come out in the viewport, and even then they didn't come out quite right. (the normals weren't popping) I could see in the slate editor the maps were being applied to the material correctly from the material preview box, but weren't being displayed in the viewport correctly, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to get it to pop like in Allegorithmic's video. I've tried it with and without the Nitrous viewport driver /sigh.

/rant

I'm sure I'm just a noob, but for the price tag I'll stick with Scultping/Crazybump, and the 3PS Shader.

Jerc

Thanks for the news !

@Moosey_G : You can indeed add color to the specular through the Specular Diffuse Influence parameter. But if you have suggestions of some missing specific control you would like to see on the specular map, go ahead We can very easily add new options and update the filter.

I don't know about your issues with 3dsmax viewport though, it might come from a refresh issue between slate and the viewport, we already experienced some of these bugs. Usually, creating a new material and plugging the filter in this fresh one instead of the original solves the issue.