nMaker - version 1.0 released
Hey everyone,
Over the course of the past ~8 months I've been working hard on nMaker. What's that? Basically it's software used to generate normal maps and height maps. Hopefully you'll like it. Here are some benefits of using nMaker:
And the list goes on. Here's a screenshot of it:
If you are interested, you can check it out yourself at: http://nmaker.me
I appreciate any feedback!
Thanks
Over the course of the past ~8 months I've been working hard on nMaker. What's that? Basically it's software used to generate normal maps and height maps. Hopefully you'll like it. Here are some benefits of using nMaker:
- Easy to use
- Very high quality of generated maps
- Cheap
- Flat design
- Ability to save projects/presets
And the list goes on. Here's a screenshot of it:
If you are interested, you can check it out yourself at: http://nmaker.me
I appreciate any feedback!
Thanks
Replies
There are a lot of reasons, but after all it's you who decides
Check out the trial version, you will definitely like it.
Man... I can start implementing the preview option right on this moment if you want to.
We'll be creating this material inside nMaker:
I think it's pretty alright looking you know what I'm saying?
You can watch the tutorial here:
[ame]
You can get nMaker here: http://nmaker.me/
Enjoy! Please give feedback
I wish it had a 3d preview. Hard to know what the sliders are doing without shaded feedback.
Also I thought it was a little strange you used JPG as your output, since normal maps shouldn't be lossy.
Keep going! This has the potential to be a great tool, I like the controls you have so far.
If you load an image without first selecting a preset, it'll flat out crash. That's probably bad :P
Doesn't support TIFF or TGA, which is a pain. I think there are a lot of things that will use these formats, they (along with PNG and BMP) tend to be the stalwarts of lossless file formats in games.
It's not clear that you click and drag up/down to change the pixel values for the generator. Little arrows or a cursor change when you hover over would be enough. A clearer colour change to indicate interactivity would be nice, too (the light grey to white is pretty subtle).
It's very slow to update (about 1 - 1.5 seconds per tweak). This is on 2k and 4k textures... which I think is probably a good standard to aim for performance on. I've not tried it at smaller resolutions.
Doesn't update interatively, you have to let go of the slider before it updates. That's a little annoying... even if the update isn't instant, it'd be nice to have it attempt to apply the current value until the user slides it again.
No numeric readouts or inputs for any sliders. That's a pain for reproducing a value you had and liked but wanted to test a tweak of.
Doesn't export at 16bit, which is a pain. I think more and more artists will be sticking to 16bit at least for normal maps, it'd be nice to have support for that.
DOES export to JPG (as the default option, too)... that probably shouldn't be an option at all. JPG is a pretty useless format for game art as it's lossy.
The heightmap generator doesn't seem to be doing anything particularly neat... it's just greyscaling the input image and playing with the levels? I'm not certain what it's doing that I wouldn't have more control over in Photoshop.
No support for Y+ normal maps... could use an invert green channel option somewhere. Not everyone's on UE4
No pan/zoom of the normal map... so if it's bigger than the window you can't see it all or you can see it at a fraction of the final resolution.
The interface design is nice and clean, but massive. You could easily reduce the scale and margins so there's not so much movement required to go between settings.
And yeah, not having a lit preview is a bit annoying.
It's a nice start and a cool little project, the output isn't too bad either, but it's not something I'd consider paying for just yet :P
I re-read this and it sounds pretty harsh, I was just jotting stuff down as I went. I didn't mean to come off as a dick, I've edited in some more reasoning...
I didn't really pay attention when recording, heh.
I'd totally implement a 3d preview... but to do that I'd need to write an entire 3D engine and then link it with my app, that would take a lot of time. When I use it I somehow translate the normal map I'm seeing into a 3d model in my head, it works. mad_cg_ninja_skillz.exe
Wow... that's not harsh at all, thanks for the feedback, it's useful!
I'm fixing the bugs you've noted already, and I'll release an update soon.
Just keep in mind this is my first project ever, I'm not a cg artist myself, it's just the first version. So there is much to come.
But yeah, if it were to find a place in my pipeline, that's what I'd be looking for in a program.