[Dillema] CrazyBump epic win, max, xnormal fail??
Hey guys, I've actually just used Crazy bump demo on a test of mine and it came out.. a billion times better. I have a million questions in my head but I can think of them XD
Why can't I achieve a similar look from Xnormal? I mean, come on!! the options and sliders of Crazy bump are amazing. Intensified AO and normal maps.. spec too. Incredible.
I'm not even gonna get started on max. Infact, I've been trying to render to texture normal maps in 3dsmax for quite a while now. And I normally get some sort of faded out.. ugly looking thing. Can't really explain it but it doesn't look like a normal map when rendered.
A couple of questions. Do you already have to have made textures for a model before you put it into crazy bump? Because in Xnormal you generate them and in Crazy bump it seems you awesomley amplifiy the details and such.
Also, I don't understand how it works when there is no UV layout. I put in a photo source texture and ofc it came out sexy as hell but I don't know how I'd apply flat texture maps to something not even mapped.
Sorry if these are noob questions but I've never used this beast before!
I guess my biggest question is, again, do you already have to have textures baked and such before going into Crazy?
I modelled it - textured it with crappy AO from xnormal : S : S and a non intensified weak normal map from Max and it came out on the right there. I then re saved all the textures from crazy bump. On the left > awesomness compared to the right.
Why can't I achieve a similar look from Xnormal? I mean, come on!! the options and sliders of Crazy bump are amazing. Intensified AO and normal maps.. spec too. Incredible.
I'm not even gonna get started on max. Infact, I've been trying to render to texture normal maps in 3dsmax for quite a while now. And I normally get some sort of faded out.. ugly looking thing. Can't really explain it but it doesn't look like a normal map when rendered.
A couple of questions. Do you already have to have made textures for a model before you put it into crazy bump? Because in Xnormal you generate them and in Crazy bump it seems you awesomley amplifiy the details and such.
Also, I don't understand how it works when there is no UV layout. I put in a photo source texture and ofc it came out sexy as hell but I don't know how I'd apply flat texture maps to something not even mapped.
Sorry if these are noob questions but I've never used this beast before!
I guess my biggest question is, again, do you already have to have textures baked and such before going into Crazy?
I modelled it - textured it with crappy AO from xnormal : S : S and a non intensified weak normal map from Max and it came out on the right there. I then re saved all the textures from crazy bump. On the left > awesomness compared to the right.
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Replies
Seriously.... I'm not in the mood. I normally play along but for f- sake.
:P
I think what Vig meant is, try to experiment with all that stuff, one step at a time ... no need to rush. Crazybump and Xnormal are fantastic tools, but cover quite a complex ground. But it will make much more sense after a while.
The differences you see are because they work in completely different ways. You will get a better feel for it by playing with them.
All these elements are quite complex taken one by one. I see you have that cool crate you are working on. You would get much better anwers about how to use this app or that app, by starting a thread in Pnp to gradually get feedback and suggestions.
Good luck!
Or in Xnormal do you just have to "hit the right buttons"?
Xnormals main purpose is to bake information from a highpoly mesh to a lowpoly mesh, through textures. Normal, AO, and many others. It's a "surface transfer" program. It has extra 2d tools, but thats another subject.
Crazybump is a filter program, doing clever things on various 2D sources. It's up to you to do whatever you want with it. It's not supposed to be accurate. Think of it as an image manipulation program. Heck, I even use it on pieces of concept art regularly, in the most unintended way.
Considering these are completely different things, I really don't get your question. Going back to my original comment : just spend some time wrapping your head around both individually. Watch vids, read manuals, you'll get it.
XNormal works with models, Crazybump works with images.
In XNormal, you bring in a high poly mesh, and a low poly mesh, and it bakes the high poly's normals and AO and such, to the Low Poly's UVs (mesh in -> images out)
CrazyBump takes images you give it, and does it's magic on them, converting them from whatever you gave it (diffuse, height, etc.) into other channels (normal, spec, ao, etc.) (images in -> images out)
It's not that XNormal sucks, or that Crazybump is more useful, it's that they do different things.
eta: DAMN YOU FRENCHIE!
So, from my experience the only way to get way better results is to use Crazy Bump.
Wich isn't free. Nice conclusion...
regarding xnormal - for optimal results, you'll have to experiment with different settings (i.e. raydistance/antialiasing..) to get a preferred normal/ao 'bake' - i've learnt that you just have to be patient and find the settings that suit that particular asset.....
Yay - in game sexyness ensues.
Also, once you get a better understanding of it all, there is another thing to chew on : besides norms (green up, green down, all that) there is also very subtle differences in ways to read them, and write them. Not just strength or colors, but very subtle things dealing with normal tangents calculation, per pixel rendering algorythms, lots of stuff. One solution : stick to one objective (realtime in unreal? Scanline render in Max?) and once you decide on this, start a thread in PnP and elaborate from there.
Its a trick of shadows. You take a high poly model and a low polymodel. You use a cage which pulls the data from the high poly or something similar. Which uses rays to bake down what the highpoly is like from a front/top down view.
You can also have floating geometry where the baker only sees the top view and therefore bakes down psuedo geomtetry.
..
Parrallax mapping is the only type of mapping that can create shadows on itself.
This is why you have trouble seeing the difference in purpose between CB and XN. XN accurately stores the difference in orientation. There is no right or wrong or "not cool enough" way to use it. It just does it. Sure there are ways to boost a normalmap to make the angle differences even stronger, hence maybe cooler. But the question of, whether app X or Y produces better normal is absolutely meaningless.
To get a better feel of what these maps do, stop messing around with 2D solutions and just go for full 3D models, baked down. You will understand it all. Just do it.
Zac, I think he meant shading, not shadows. It's a common mistake/language abuse, I don't think he is talking about parallax at all.
Normal maps affect the surface of a piece of geometry so when light hits it, it doesn't just get the flat percentage of the lights intensity that it would normally receive, but it actually allows you to "warp" the normals without adding geometry (using a texture) to create the illusion of a more detailed surface.
Right now you're asking "I found crazybump, it brings the boys to the yard, am I right!? Can I get a hellz yea!?"
yea its awesome, I wouldn't have bought a license from Ryan Clark (a long time PC member and author of crazybump, a really awesome guy) if crazybump didn't do a lot of great stuff very quickly.
They're all tools that have strengths and weaknesses. You need to find out what those are so you know which one is best for what job. How do you do that? Work with them more and ask specific questions.
If you're serious about exploring the pros and cons of those three methods I can give you my thoughts on each but you'll probably want more perspective than just mine.
First off, as stated multiple times you need to understand what a normal map is and how it works. This has been explained here already so i will skip that.
Now, if you understand how a normal map works, you should understand that the end result is directly related to your highpoly, lowpoly and bake. If the end result looks like shit, its because one of those 3 steps are shit.
1. If your highpoly mesh is shit, the end result will be shit. This is easy to tell. Simply look at your mesh, is it interesting all on its own?
2. If your lowpoly mesh is shit, ie: you dont have enough geometry to support the shapes in your highpoly, bad uvs, etc the end result will be shit.
3. If your bake is shit, ie: poor smoothing, poorly set up cage resulting in skewed details, or obvious seams, etc the end result will be shit.
So, you've finished your bake, threw some noisy overlay textures on it and it looks bad, who is to blame? Is it the software that is doing exactly what you tell it to do? Must be!
Now, as far as crazybump goes, it is an awesome tool that can help make details pop in your diffuse/spec textures(or generate normals from bump, but thats not what you're doing here). What you're using it for has absolutely nothing to do with your geometry bake, and thus no relevance for comparison. I would absolutely never ever want to see my bakes look like your "better" image right after baking, this would be terrible and mean that my bakes look nothing like my HP mesh, which is a bad thing if you've got a good HP mesh.
Its important to understand what sort of effects you can add to your textures to save time, and make things "pop", but its even more important in this case to realize that you need quality source to generate these effects from in the first place, and that without your bake you wouldn't even be able to use crazybump in the same fashion.
Crazybump (though I must say is very good at what it does for fear of getting shouted at) is still essentially a bunch of filters. Crazybump is only useful for making quick efforts at what you can do yourself if you spend the time learning.
I personally don't use CrazyBump (at home and work) as I feel that the more work a piece of software does for me, the less control I have over the final result. As the final result is what does the talking in my line of work as a game artist, I want to be the one who can sit there and say how every step of the texturing was done, without EVER having to say "I used a photograph and processed it through CrazyBump" and hearing the reply of a single clap, from a prospective employer.
What I mean to say is, CrazyBump is for beginners, or lazy professionals.
-Adam
LoM Chaos: I did this a while back, might help you to understand a little of what's happening inside of CrazyBump (and the related filters or programs) to get you those results; http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/9046/normalmapminitutrf7.jpg
agreed, I was being a bit glib when I said it was for lazy professionals.
It should be noted though that a professional using CrazyBump, still has the knowledge to do what he/she does with CrazyBump, to do the same with Photoshop. I just think that it's important to note that as a beginner you should be more concerned with how crazybump works, and not how to use it.
Then again, you did feel the need to reply and let everyone know, which is fair, I suppose... bell end.
Is it a little annoying he constantly makes excuses for his art being semi-ok because of his age? Yea.
But does he know he needs an answer to a question he's not sure how to ask? Yea.
At least he's figuring out the answers and refining the way he asks questions. Which is better than never putting himself out there and choosing to remain in the dark about things.
At PC, you might get slapped around a bit but you almost always get useful info.
LOL I must really suck then, because I have never gotten decent results from the Nvidia Filter, and I find that CB gives me FAR more control over my end result, rather than taking any control away from me. I think you are sorely mistaken. A professional should always be using the best tools at his disposal, and anything else that improves his efficiency and end product.
Yea you can do some of the same stuff in photoshop and the nvidia filter, with some tweaking and outside love can get you some decent results. But crazybump takes a lot of the manual steps and gives you a nice little interface and does a bunch of things for you right out of the box.
It's a bit like building a Rube Goldberg machine out of stuff you find laying around the house, just to make toast. Or just buying a toaster.
"Professionals" use CrazyBump because it's more efficient.
NVidia filter doesn't give as good a result.
This isn't a dillemma, it's a farce.
What you meant to say to make sense is something like...
"I can use a hammer, or ask someone else to use the hammer to acheive the same result"
However getting someone else to do things for use is LAZY!
LazyBump, that's a far better name. If you have that much difficulty making normal maps (or hammering nails into wood) yourself using NVidia filter, then use LazyBump (get someone else to do it for you). As you say, you get the same results, but you get no better as an artist.
ETA: HA HA! I totally fell for the troll. . . my bad.
btw, no hard feelings, I hope this isn't coming across as anger, I like to debate with a guy as much as I like to drink with them.
Why are we even using these new fangled computerized device machines? They just do all the work for you and you don't get better as an artist. We should switch back to fingerpainting with reptile shit on cave walls, that's where the true skill lies.
idiot.
Option A) You can take 2 dozen drunken steps through a mine field to get across a field.
Highly likely you'll screw up and someone will have to clean up your bloody carcass.
Option
Get across the field so fast you have time to stop for a lap dance.
You're argument makes about as much sense as forcing programmers to write all their code out using pen and paper first.
The Nvidia filter needs a lot of outside help to get decent results, which is why I compare it to a Rube Goldberg machine. You can even ignore it all together and get better results. But honestly Crazybump is easier to use, gives great highly tweakable results really fast. The fact that you can tweak and see the results in a preview saves a mother f-ton of time right there.
Top: Nivida Filter
Bottom: Mike's home brew normal map PhotoShop Script (that uses Xnormals normalize).
Personally I can get better results from the source using Crazybump in half the time it took to make either of those. If you're trusting the 5+ year old Nvidia filter to get the job done you're delusional.
You're purest attitude is using some pretty retarded logic.
moron.
Now that I think about it, I actually don't even have a problem with you calling me lazy. IMO, any artist worth his salt SHOULD be lazy in some respects, and should ALWAYS be looking for ways to make his life easier while maintaining or improving the quality of his results. . .
Thanks for taking your time to reply.
Wow, really? I mean, are you serious here? You cant possibly think that any employer would ever care that you spent MORE time to get the SAME result on an asset, like that is something to brag about? This is a negative to anyone with half a brain. Game studios, contrary to what you may think, operate on tight deadlines with the goal of producing content at the most efficient pace. If you can do something just as good as the next guy, in less time, this is the most powerful asset you could possibly hold as a prospective employee.
I would really like to know what video game college you went to that beat this foolish opinion into your head, because it sure as fuck didn't come from actually working in the games industry.