nDo is more customizable, and you can get more accurate results for pretty much all of the map variations. the presets are a life saver, and you can convert almost any map into any other map quite accurately. id say nDo.
Neither is "better" - it depends on what you are doing with it.
Crazybump is great for converting heightmaps or photos into simplistic BSP-stype normal maps.
NDo can do this as well, but also has the option of sculpting full 3D normals in a 2D environment (in Photoshop).
If you have no desire to actually sculpt normals, then CB might be a better (faster) option. Alternatively if you want to sculpt, or have more preset options for different material types, NDo might be better.
Both apps have trial versions. Why ask here which is better, instead of trying them for yourself? Use the one that works best for you.
You can't get a dry cut answer for something like this, both can do the same stuff, but the little changes are what defines the programs.
Seriously, why don't you try out the trials? We can spend all day telling your how 'cool' CB or NDO2 is, but it will be all for naught if you don't spend some time trying to understand the tools.
So theoretically speaking, I can generate a brick wall normal from a photo with both programs, and with a little tweaking, I can get generally the same quality normal? I think that's what he's getting at.
If you're just generating normals from photos, then they are about the same. Each one has different settings and options which you may or may not prefer.
Overall, NDO2 has more functionality, as you can create fully 3d normals from scratch with Photoshop's tools. But maybe that's something Crazybump will add in time.
CrazyBump has a major limitation if you are using it in a production environment, it is completely destructive and if the art director asks you to edit your normal map you will want to cry. It is also a pain in crazy bump that there is no reload button if you want to go back and edit the greyscale or diffuse texture you are using to extract the normal map. For those two reasons we moved away from CrazyBump, that being said nDO2 is extremely slow and the artists hate waiting for it to do simple tweaks, but in the end they'd rather wait a bit then have to start over each time I ask for an edit to the resulting normal map.
There is more control and iteration in nDo2, there is more speed and performance in CrazyBump.
Cb tends to give more blobby results, whereas NdO2 tends to give me more high frequency details on my normal maps.
Unless you really paint your heightmap by hand, again it depends, try both. Or use both.
I think the issue stems from the proper lack of control for the variables and presets.
I mean I have control over Large Detail, Medium Detail and Small Detail, plus a few others. The problem is, one of them is what you could call "Base Detail" and makes stuff really blobby because it's beveling the whole chunk of the detail, so setting that to zero will enable you to have finer control.
It's the naming issue, CrazyBump could improve that greatly to help both Technical and normal Artists understand what is what.
Necroing this thread since I didn't want to start a new one about a similar subject.
Does anyone know if Crazybump is likely to get updated to have a similar feature set to NDo? IIRC the Crazybump dev posts here right? Or is that the XNormal guy?... not sure.
In any case, I literally just bought Crazybump, and then a couple days later discovered NDo, although not sure how I missed NDo the first time round. I'm kinda regretting my Crazybump purchase now since NDo appears to do all of it and more.
What are the odds of a refund do you think? I was having a few performance issues with CB anyway and I tried contacting the Crazybump about 5 days ago but I didn't hear anything yet. The performance issues are sorted but I'm still regretting not going for NDo.
I never got a response from Ryan so I'm not sure if he's planning on updating CrazyBump to be competitive feature set wise. Our studio has purchased licenses for nDo2, the non destructive workflow in nDo2 made it the winner for us.
I never got a response from Ryan so I'm not sure if he's planning on updating CrazyBump to be competitive feature set wise. Our studio has purchased licenses for nDo2, non destructive workflow in nDo2 made it the winner for us.
Cheers for the reply, Malcolm.
Yeah feels very much like he's abandoned it, puny humans are disappoint.
I got a reply from the vendor, Plimus or something they're called, but nothing from the man himself.
I feel pretty rude asking for a refund, and if that's not possible then I'll just suck it up and buy NDo. It does look like the much better choice... just wish I had seen it (from under my rock as it would seem) a few days earlier!
Ryan disappeared from the face of the earth months ago, in fact this is starting to be a bit worrying. Is anyone here close to him? One doesn't simply vanish! Oo
Ryan disappeared from the face of the earth months ago, in fact this is starting to be a bit worrying. Is anyone here close to him? One doesn't simply vanish! Oo
Uh oh.
Yeah I thought I remembered him being prominent here, wasn't he one of the first guys to be interviewed on the Polycount relaunch?
Let's hope he's just moved on to bigger, brighter things and doesn't have the time to post here.
Otherwise I'm gonna be feeling even more guilty about asking for a refund.
Substance Designer is completely non destructive but may be overkill if all you want to do is create normal maps, AO, etc from a diffuse.
As an alternative to Crazybump and nDo2 you might want to try B2M though.
It has far better performance than both, quality is also far above Crazybump and equivalent to nDo2 although you have more control over the outputs and you can use it as a standalone or directly in 3dsMax, Maya, Modo, UE3 or Unity.
It's also non-destructive as every setting can be saved as preset with their bitmap input so you can iterate at any moment and regenerate the normal, spec, AO, etc.
I found the performance in stand alone B2M to be quite poor on my home PC, just as slow as nDo2, but without layers and not in photoshop. I didn't realize it was non destructive, I uninstalled it after 10min of using, offered less flexibility than nDo2 at least when I tried it.
B2M should even be faster than Crazybump, so there was probably something wrong when you tested it.
You should give it a try again and make sure it's using the GPU accelerated engine
Replies
NDO is also far slower than Crazybump, and shuffling textures between the two applications via clipboard is rather easy.
Crazybump is great for converting heightmaps or photos into simplistic BSP-stype normal maps.
NDo can do this as well, but also has the option of sculpting full 3D normals in a 2D environment (in Photoshop).
If you have no desire to actually sculpt normals, then CB might be a better (faster) option. Alternatively if you want to sculpt, or have more preset options for different material types, NDo might be better.
Both apps have trial versions. Why ask here which is better, instead of trying them for yourself? Use the one that works best for you.
Seriously, why don't you try out the trials? We can spend all day telling your how 'cool' CB or NDO2 is, but it will be all for naught if you don't spend some time trying to understand the tools.
Overall, NDO2 has more functionality, as you can create fully 3d normals from scratch with Photoshop's tools. But maybe that's something Crazybump will add in time.
Unless you really paint your heightmap by hand, again it depends, try both. Or use both.
There is more control and iteration in nDo2, there is more speed and performance in CrazyBump.
I think the issue stems from the proper lack of control for the variables and presets.
I mean I have control over Large Detail, Medium Detail and Small Detail, plus a few others. The problem is, one of them is what you could call "Base Detail" and makes stuff really blobby because it's beveling the whole chunk of the detail, so setting that to zero will enable you to have finer control.
It's the naming issue, CrazyBump could improve that greatly to help both Technical and normal Artists understand what is what.
Does anyone know if Crazybump is likely to get updated to have a similar feature set to NDo? IIRC the Crazybump dev posts here right? Or is that the XNormal guy?... not sure.
In any case, I literally just bought Crazybump, and then a couple days later discovered NDo, although not sure how I missed NDo the first time round. I'm kinda regretting my Crazybump purchase now since NDo appears to do all of it and more.
What are the odds of a refund do you think? I was having a few performance issues with CB anyway and I tried contacting the Crazybump about 5 days ago but I didn't hear anything yet. The performance issues are sorted but I'm still regretting not going for NDo.
Cheers for the reply, Malcolm.
Yeah feels very much like he's abandoned it, puny humans are disappoint.
I got a reply from the vendor, Plimus or something they're called, but nothing from the man himself.
I feel pretty rude asking for a refund, and if that's not possible then I'll just suck it up and buy NDo. It does look like the much better choice... just wish I had seen it (from under my rock as it would seem) a few days earlier!
Uh oh.
Yeah I thought I remembered him being prominent here, wasn't he one of the first guys to be interviewed on the Polycount relaunch?
Let's hope he's just moved on to bigger, brighter things and doesn't have the time to post here.
Otherwise I'm gonna be feeling even more guilty about asking for a refund.
As an alternative to Crazybump and nDo2 you might want to try B2M though.
It has far better performance than both, quality is also far above Crazybump and equivalent to nDo2 although you have more control over the outputs and you can use it as a standalone or directly in 3dsMax, Maya, Modo, UE3 or Unity.
It's also non-destructive as every setting can be saved as preset with their bitmap input so you can iterate at any moment and regenerate the normal, spec, AO, etc.
You should give it a try again and make sure it's using the GPU accelerated engine