pixplant vs crazybump

AnimeAngel

Just wondering if anyone has compared these 2 head to head and what their thoughts were.
http://www.pixplant.com/index.php
http://crazybump.com/

I know a lot of people use and love crazybump. It is indeed a very nice tool to have handy but recently someone brought pixplant to my attention. For the most part they both seem to do pretty much the same thing but pixplant is almost half the price of crazybump. Pixplant price atm is $175 and Crazybump is $299.
After doing a bit of comparison myself one major difference I have noticed is that pixplant loads maps faster and it just seems to run a lot lighter then crazybump, but pixplant does not seem to have quite as many options. I couldn't do a head to head comparison though as my crazybump trial has expired.

So I was wondering what others thoughts of them, because I am thinking of buying one of them in the near future

glib

Why are you looking at the professional pricing for crazybump? Wouldn't you be looking at either the personal or student versions for $100 and $50 respectively?

cryrid

Why are you looking at the professional pricing for crazybump? Wouldn't you be looking at either the personal or student versions for $100 and $50 respectively?

Those are both for non-commercial use. Pixplant also has educational pricing available, but he's just looking at the commercial versions for those who plan on making money with their work.

Mark Dygert

Pixplant: Normal, Displacement, Specular, Diffuse.
Crazy Bump: Normal, Displacement, Ambient Occlusion, Specular, Diffuse.

Crazybump also seems to have a little better height map and sharper normal map.

I think pixplant just automates what you can do normally with the nvidia filter and a bunch of time. Where crazybump pours liquid sex on everything it touches.

But honestly I suggest trying them both out and go with what gives you the best results in the least amount of time.

cryrid

Crazybump also seems to have a little better height map and sharper normal map.

Would it make a difference that Pixplant has medium detail set to 14% and fine set to 4%, where Crazybump has them at 99% and 16%?

AnimeAngel

Ya not really interested in student or personnel licenses. need the commercial license so I can make money using it.

The crazybump Ao is kind of nice but I think you still get better results by baking that out using max. More control and such but does take a bit longer then using cb.
As far as settings, yah I'd like to see them set with the same settings and see how they compare but I think Vig might be right that CB just give a better detailed result.

cryrid

The crazybump Ao is kind of nice but I think you still get better results by baking that out using max

Wouldn't the AO CB generates be based purely the textures though?
(I'm not sure if Max does this as well, or if it only calculates AO based on the actual geometry).

I gave pixplant a try. There's less options, but for what it does the results still seemed rather decent (and their videos made it look easy to unskew images and create seamless results). Given the price differences and what each program does differently, I'm not sure which option I'd personally prefer.

ParoXum

Pixplant: Seamless tiling generator that can speed up your process at making textures. Decent normal map generator, specular, displacement is less decent.

CB: Gives more depth to your normal maps using the heightmap generator. Less fine detail control (you often have to loose the heightmap for fine details) where pixplant can create sharp details.

CB's ambient occlusion is not that good when used from photos, but can be quite powerful when used from normal maps (interesting when you dont want to bake an AO for hours).