what software for making maps, in particular normal maps

suwhan · Feb 2019

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to get a quick ratio on what software you used to create various maps, in particular, normal maps. If you could post the software you use the most in a professional setting, that would be awesome!

Thanks in advance!

Eric Chadwick · Feb 2019

From geometry, I'd recommend Toolbag.

From images, or procedurally, Substance Designer.

musashidan · Feb 2019

Sub Painter for 1:1 bakes. Designer for tiling NMs. B2M for 'quick and dirties'.

jRocket · Feb 2019

I donno if this is an unpopular opinion here, but I gotta say- Substance just is NOT very good for normal map baking. The match by name baking is fairly limited- if you want to bake multiple high polys to a single low poly... you can't do that. Marmoset's bake groups are much better for that. You also can't even see your high poly in the viewport to see how well it matches up with the low poly. Sure, Substance baking works for simple tasks, but as a baker Marmoset has always just been better and bakes are much faster.

musashidan · Feb 2019

The main advantage for me baking in SP is that it's in the viewport ready to start texturing. Baking in TB is an extra step to get back into SP. I could be using 10 texture sets in a single project so import/export is a pain. Match by mesh name is not a problem once everything is planned in advance and set up in your DCC, although I would like to see a match by MatID option as well.

Also, maybe I'm missing something, but the TB bake groups are still using a _high/_low naming convention with an extra <variation> tag so isn't it just the same for setting up the mesh names in the .fbx file?

The other thing I'm curious about is how does TB account for what SP outputs as Texture sets? If it's by using bake groups then this is extra setup. In SP I can just assign MatID to my .FBX imported file and output maps based on the texture sets.

Personally I don't like having the HP in the scene/viewport. I already know that my low/high match because I set that up in my DCC.

TB is a fantastic baker, though. AO/Curvature bakes are far superior to SP. Fast and with that great skew painting feature. I would definitely use it if there was a bridge to SP.

what software for making maps, in particular normal maps

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