New CrazyBump Beta

Ryan Clark

Dear Polycount,

I've just posted a new CrazyBump beta test. I would appreciate your feedback!

www.crazybump.com/release/CrazyBump_Beta_Feb4.exe


changes:

-New "extra fine detail" slider added to the normal map controls.

-New "slope influence" slider added to the specmap controls.

-New option to toggle horizontal and vertical wrapping.

-The normal mixer will tile your low-res detail textures, instead of scaling them up.

-Fixed a problem with non-responsive context menus on some PCs.

metalliandy

Ahh nice work Ryan!

Downloading now

Shogun3d

Fantastic. Allow me, good sir...*click*

killingpeople

woot

Vonklaus

Awesome! I will definitely download this!

Pavel Petrenko

Thanks Ryan Clark!

Ryan Clark

Any of y'all have an 8-core PC, or quad-core-with-hyperthreading?

I plan to add 8-core support pretty soon, and I seek guinea pigs to help test it!

(I only have two cores over here. And a ball-mouse. And a pet dinosaur.)

EarthQuake

I've got a quadcore q6600 here, performance seems very good, most operations are near instant. It would be cool to get a 64 bit version.

One cool thing that i would love to see, i'm not sure how feasible this is however but with hard surface models i get a lot of minor artifacts when i run the detail pass thing, what happens is the gradients in the normals to compensate for lowpoly smoothing ends up in that detail map, and it makes the end result look like i've got smoothing errors where i really dont. So i spend a good deal of time editing these things out. It would be cool if there was some sort of smart filter there to detect that sort of thing, but i'm not sure how you would do it.

You can see what i mean here:



This may not seem like a big deal, but when you've got a real complex mesh, you start to see these sort of artifacts all over the place, and it gets to be a real chore to get clean results.

Here is the TGA used in those shots:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/499159/mateba_normals.rar

Disco Stu

hey ryan i have an i7 quadcore so if you need a pig let me know

Ikuru

Thanks a lot Mr!

Ryan Clark

@EarthQuake:

Thanks for the idea!

The simplest solution I can think of would be to give CrazyBump the ability to open object-space normal maps. That way, those artifacts wouldn't be present in the first place.

I'm not imagining having CB create object-space maps from scratch. Rather, I'm imagining having CB load existing object-space maps, so that you can modify them, generate other maps from them, or add details using the mixer.

Would that be a feature that many people would use?

Valandar

*applause* Wheee! Crazybump is one of the best tools out there!

... Now to save up the dosh to get a copy. >.<

Eric Chadwick

Ryan Clark wrote: »

I'm imagining having CB load existing object-space maps, so that you can modify them, generate other maps from them, or add details using the mixer.

Would that be a feature that many people would use?

Totally awesome idea! I was using OS maps before I was laid off, probably will again. When I do, I'll be wanting a mixer. I remember EQ saying it used to be a bit of a pain for him, with a custom tool. I haven't spent enough time with OS maps to know though.

Ryan Clark

This beta can actually load object-space maps in the mixer. So you can add details (tangent-space or greyscale) to an object-space map.

But the preview doesn't support object-space, so it'll be useless. Likewise the spec / occlusion / displacement tabs will be useless.

But if you only want to mix details onto an existing obj-space map, you can try loading it into the mixer.

@EarthQuake:
Would you be able to give me an object-space version of your mateba_normals, to play with?

EarthQuake

Ryan Clark wrote: »

@EarthQuake:

Thanks for the idea!

The simplest solution I can think of would be to give CrazyBump the ability to open object-space normal maps. That way, those artifacts wouldn't be present in the first place.

I'm not imagining having CB create object-space maps from scratch. Rather, I'm imagining having CB load existing object-space maps, so that you can modify them, generate other maps from them, or add details using the mixer.

Would that be a feature that many people would use?

Yeah i think that would be very useful, then its just a matter of rendering an extra map, which is very easy.

Ryan Clark wrote: »

@EarthQuake:
Would you be able to give me an object-space version of your mateba_normals, to play with?

How about another asset that uses OS?
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/499159/cb_os_test.rar

TGA+OBJ from a different gun.

Ryan Clark

Hey all,

Here's a test build with 8-thread support:
www.crazybump.com/release/CrazyBump_Beta_Feb7.exe

I hope to learn how it performs on a quad-core i7 processor... to learn whether CrazyBump benefits from hyperthreading.

If you load a large image ( 2048 x 2048 ) on your i7 machine, does CrazyBump run faster when the toggle is set to 8 threads?

Thanks very much for your help!

Eric Chadwick

I have just 4 cores here. I can see via Taskmgr that CB (feb7) is using all four, which is great.

I get a consistent crash:

1. Load a 2048x2048 normalmap TGA.
2. Go to the Occlusion tab.
3. Click left and right on the Intensity slider, once every 1/2 second. I can click about 10 times before it dumps me to the desktop.

There's a brief message window before CB is gone completely, too fast to read though.

Edit... system specs: WinXP 32 sp3, Intel Core2 Quad @ 2.40GHz, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTX.

Whargoul

I'll try it today on my 8 core at work.

Whargoul

I don't see any significant speedup when toggling between 4 and 8 threads - and CPU usuage seems to float around %40-45 in either case, when processing.

Ryan Clark

Thanks Whargoul! It sounds like there's room for improvement in CB's multithreading. I shall keep brewing!

@EricChadwick: Thanks very much for the crash report! That definitely needs fixing before 1.2 can be officially released

Ryan Clark

Here is a new beta, which should fix the crash Eric was seeing.

It should also make better use of multiple CPUs. Would you mind testing it, Whargoul? I'm hoping it does better than 45% this time!

http://www.crazybump.com/release/CrazyBump_Beta_Feb15.exe

NAIMA

Ryan Clark wrote: »

Any of y'all have an 8-core PC, or quad-core-with-hyperthreading?

I plan to add 8-core support pretty soon, and I seek guinea pigs to help test it!

(I only have two cores over here. And a ball-mouse. And a pet dinosaur.)

I havea 8 core i 7 ....

Whargoul

It seems about the same - maybe even worse? I didn't get the debug cores popup this time either, maybe it's not enabled? I used a 4k test image, and it usally floated around %30 CPU usage, hitting %45 at peak once in a while while fiddlign with the sliders.

mickyg

Does using 8 cores need to be enabled somewhere, or is it automatically on?

Ryan Clark

Thanks Whargoul!

This build automatically uses whatever number of cores it detects. Alas, it seems like CB doesn't really benefit from more than 4 cores at present. Further investigation is required!