Congrats to Ryan, Creator of Crazy Bump
polycounter lvl 18
CrazyBump is out of Beta!
http://crazybump.com/buy.html
Ryan, thank you for CrazyBump, man, and your Technical Support.
Congratulations to Ryan for gett'n PAID!
http://crazybump.com/buy.html
Ryan, thank you for CrazyBump, man, and your Technical Support.
Congratulations to Ryan for gett'n PAID!
Replies
Looks for torrents
lol j/k
grats man, we've been leeching of your genius for too long.
I'll have to give it a buy when I get some monies.
I can't express how awesome this has been helping you develop this awesome program, tool, utility along the way.
It has saved me so much time with everything. I'm gonna be pitching it to hopefully get a good number of licenses for our guys at work.
All this hard work you have done on this and dedication has really shown. I hope you are now able to reap the rewards from it and take a much needed vacation with your earnings.
So now...I gotta ask. What is next?
He's going to be rolling in it ... every studio I know that works with normal maps uses Crazybump now!
Alex
I am grateful for all of the support and helpful suggestions that everybody on PolyCount has offered!
And, alex, you aren't too far from the mark there... just released and it's already at v1.02
EDIT: This is a general question I've had but Ryan's release reminded me of it - why do applications cost more for companies than they do for "personals" or individuals? Always wondered that..
When a studio buys a tool, they perceive it as an investment. The tool is expected to save artist's time. Artist's time translates directly into money. So from a studio's perspective a good tool almost literally pays for itself.
But the hobbyist doesn't share that perception. He doesn't expect his tools to pay him back, so he is spending money where the studio is investing it. That naturally makes him more cautious, so it makes sense to offer him a discount.
But I can't really say that to the hobbyists. If I want them to use my software it sorta requires a different pitch... it can't cost them as much because it doesn't save them as much
By the way. How did you reach the $99 price point for the personal license, Ryan?
I think I picked the wrong career :S
Good - you deserve it Ryan. I'm sure there'll be some cash heading your way soon.
Superb software, just superb.
Congratulations,
=J
Be sure, I'll hammer both my boss and my AD for ordering a few
cant wait for 2 ;-)
...but no seriously, thanks for making this wonderful tool in the first place, its a wonderful thing. :poly129:
HA HA HA I swear. . .I'm the funniest guy I know . . .
I'll definitely be recommending this app for our studio once we get heavy with the normal maps.
The best of luck with selling tonnes of licenses, mate.
-caseyjones
Jk, I find it a lot more reasonable and affordable than my transit pass.
@East: I took the professional price, divided by three, and rounded down.
@JesseMoody:
My next project is probably CrazyBump for OSX. I'm hoping a port won't take long, but I really don't have the first clue about OSX development. (yet)
I also have a yearning to play around with the iPhone SDK. Maybe a game will come of that. Can't say until I try it out.
Most importantly, I am open to suggestions. If there's a portion of your workflow that needs improvement, I want to know about it!
I have two texture tool ideas you might be interested in to offer up...
I had already toyed around with these ideas a little (my computer sucks at home so i dabble with pixel art and retarded shit like this sometimes)
1. "Mat Lab" - a base material & swatch library creator
The basic idea, shown above, is the tool would take a collection of bitmaps and composite a base psd file together. I would love a tool like this.
an artist would create a "Material ID Map" Labeled in the pic above as a "Material Map" and the colors in it would reference a Material Library the artist could create and edit. The bake would dump all these maps and their respective masks into associated sets/groups into PSD format.
quake 4 uses a similar map, they call a Hit Map used for their material detection system.
Here is a rough layout of "library viewing and creating" menus i dreamed up with a demo of a dumpy little prog called mockupscreens:
on the left you have the library and the materials associated with it.
next, to the right, the maps associated with the material.
next, options to assign maps to a material to add to your library, and a preview window.
His is a rough layout for Baking options:
This is where you assign a Mat ID Map to a Library, and Easy-Bake your yummy PSD Cake.
Also, I plopped a little menu in there for creating a PSD swatch file. It would create a Photoshop .ACO File that would name the Swatches accordingly so you can load that puppy up in Photoshop and paint the right color for the right material. Just like a coloring book. It would be a great way to get a head start on texturing stuff.
2. NBump edging tool
I've been looking for time to develop this idea a little more, but whatever. Basically, it would help detail the edges for geometry on a map level. I've seen a little on shaders that do this, I've never seen them in action aside from pictures. If it works realtime, that's cool.. *shrugs* I had been meaning to download a demo of Carrara and try the Evaluation of this shader I've just been busy. That shader has some cool options that I'd love to see incorporated into a texturing tool somehow using the coordinates available in the geometry and world space to figure out how to make a nice edging tool. here's an image that explains the concept on a high-level (all I got to):
I'd love to see any of these two ideas.
-kp
I guess the idea behind the material editor thing would be to create PSDs organized by hit area? Wouldn't that be very engine-specific?
The f-Edge plugin for Max kind of allows you to do the edge thing. If you want to paint things along the edges, you could bake f-Edge out to a mask for a 3D painter like Modo or BodyPaint or whatever.
Or you can quickly combine f-Edge with other procedurals in Max, like to add dents across edges. Download the zip, look in the Help folder, and down at the very bottom of the page they explain the setup for this sample...
Yes, exactly like that. It has nothing to do with a Quake 4 Hit Map, I was just pointing out it would look a lot like one. It would basically create base materials for all maps to start polishing over. Coupled with an edge tool, It'd take an art asset to half completed.
Thanks for the heads up on that plugin
I didn't mean quake4 specifically, I'm just thinking every developer uses different bitmap setups. I wonder how many developers use the export pipeline of storing all the maps for one entity inside a single PSD, using a specific layer/group layout? I understand the benefits of it, splitting and compressing at build time, just not sure if a lot of teams use it.
Because that's all what it's helping to create, the textures. There was no real time shader process in my mind. The PSD was just a way to leave room for corrections to the mask.
The goal was to spend a lot of time creating a good base texture and having that work distrubuted across all game assets, to be able to reference the library textures using this imagined "Mat ID Map" on the fly and mask it into a fresh texture map. Where I color Red, I'd get a diffuse, bump, spec (whatever was available) for Metal to poop out into a PSD. Where I color Blue, my sweet base wood texture would poop out.
Edit: Maybe you mean Engines that don't use Gloss Maps or something?
in "Mat_Lab00.gif" the second pic i posted, When you assign Maps for a Texture, I thought a user could define the name of the "Set" or Map Type by clicking on the "+Additional Map" button. So, ideally it wouldn't create empty Sets.
I haven't seen many artists use this workflow, team continuity has been driven by the concept art or "proof" pieces. Sometimes artists pull from a common texture morgue, but then everyone paints and overlays the heck out of them.
But I'm probably in the minority, I haven't been doing a ton of texturing.
Sounds interesting.
Although with the much higher commercial price which will work nicely as a decoy price, you'll probably sell plenty of non-commercial licenses even at the rather unfriendly-looking $99 price tag.
I wish you luck, CrazyBump is an awesome product, and while I haven't used it as much as I'd like to yet I look forward to paying for it when I start using it again.
Thx again for all the hard work Ryan
Don't forget us little people when you're a bazillionaire!
- Make a plugin for Photoshop that shows the image tiling outside of the canvas area!
- Create a plugin that enables projection painting in CS3 Extended - they've got awesome brushes and a 3D viewer in the same program, but you can't use one on the other.
Texturedesk is probably the closest thing to a tile previewer for Photoshop, Ryan you might get some ideas from it.
http://www.spectralogue.com/texturedesk/
http://www.electriciris.com/
Unless Ryan you could one-up their problems (price, performance, ?,) it looks like you might face an uphill battle getting customers. Besides there are all the 3D paint alternatives these days, some reviewed here...
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=52697