Newbie question. PBR alternative to Crazy Bump or AwesomeBump?

TheDonquixotic

I usually get my normal bumping stuff from baking a hi poly model, but in the course of working on a current piece I wanted to grab a texture and convert that into a normal map. Using CrazyBump, I could plug in a texture, and get a Diffuse, Spec, AO, and Normal map output. I'm using a PBR workflow though and was curious if there was an alternative that would ditch the spec for a metalness/gloss maps? 

I imagine there are some issues about trying to pull a gloss or metalness from a single color texture image, but I've seen some guides on how to do a decent approx using photoshop or the materials nodes in Blender. I'm curious if there's a program that does it automatically though, similar to CrazyBump. 

Any help?

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TheDonquixotic

TeriyakiStyle said:

Hard to give advice without seeing anything.  But yeah probably knald?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but knald looks like it generates it's normal maps etc from a hi poly source mesh. I'm looking for a way to take a single 2D image and produce normals from it (like Crazy Bump) but also gloss/metalness maps. 

Looking around, it seems Allegorithmic has a product called Bitmap2Material that does this. Looks like a great tool. Costs money though, and I'd of course prefer something free as I am just a newbie. 

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TheDonquixotic

TeriyakiStyle said:

I'm the google now!

https://www.knaldtech.com/get-knald/




Or B2M is fine but the pricing plans etc. they are asking is a higher commitment.

I googled Knald when you mentioned it and looked at their website.. I missed the section you giffed when I initially looked at it and then went straight to documentation where I got pretty confused. Thank you for clearing things up. I'm still new to the baking and rendering process, so there's some technical stuff I'm still trying to get my head around. I'm currently using Marmoset for my baking and I still don't understand half of the maps it can bake. Still haven't figured out how to use the ID map to bake multiple materials into one map. I'm a traditional 2D artist who now works as a front end developer, and was wanting to make some stuff in VR so this is all still pretty new for me. Thank you again!

EarthQuake

I think Allegorithmic's B2M is the most comprehensive option for this task: https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/bitmap2material

gnoop

It's a kind of a thing of the past .   You would only get an acceptable normal map that way  from  an image  resembling   its  own depth.    And since a correct normal map is very important for PBR  reflections etc.   it became more or less useless now.     Even before PBR   those crasybumped  things looked ugly usually  once lighting gets tangent.  It only works ok for very subtle height differences  around 2mm 

 In fact you could take 5-6 close photographs of a flat subject with a bit of parallax    and get a true super detailed geometry /depth  map with a soft like reality capture or photoscan .

TheDonquixotic

gnoop said:

It's a kind of a thing of the past .   You would only get an acceptable normal map that way  from  an image  resembling   its  own depth.    And since a correct normal map is very important for PBR  reflections etc.   it became more or less useless now.     Even before PBR   those crasybumped  things looked ugly usually  once lighting gets tangent.  It only works ok for very subtle height differences  around 2mm 

 In fact you could take 5-6 close photographs of a flat subject with a bit of parallax    and get a true super detailed geometry /depth  map with a soft like reality capture or photoscan .

That's cool. I've used photoscan a little bit. I like Autodesk Remake's workflow better. I'm guessing I can make bump maps from pretty much any mesh that I build using a scan though right? I'll look into that. 

I was mostly looking at this for hackey halfway stuff though. Nothing probably over the 2mm as you say. Just a little extra surface texture for something that I feel could use a little more but don't want to go to the trouble of scanning a bunch of stuff for.