I posted about this in the artist’s section of the Ogre forums already, but I figured I’d post it in my blog too.
I’m looking for a content pipeline to generate normal, displacement and specular maps from reference photos, and I’ve been playing with the demos of both CrazyBump ($299) and ShaderMap Pro ($19.99). In my tests, CrazyBump seems to give me the superior results very quickly, and I’ve been impressed by both the default setup and the amount of tweakables it has. It seems to pick up surface details really well compared to ShaderMap Pro, which seems to muddy them a little in most cases.
A case in point (CrazyBump on the left, ShaderMap Pro on the right):
The results are very similar, except that the surface of the stones is more ‘polished’ on ShaderMap; the indentations and scratch marks are always lower frequency, and the fine details are generally being lost. Yes, I know they’re probably using slightly different preview shaders, but the differences are obvious in the textures themselves too. I’ve tried tweaking all the generation settings and yet I still can’t get ShaderMap to register the scratches and scuffs at the level of detail that CrazyBump does right off the bat. CrazyBump also has lots more options generally when it comes to tweaking the results and I’ve found I can get quite customisable results with the input images I’ve tried.
So to me, it looks like CrazyBump is worth the price premium. ShaderMap Pro produces some nice results too, and for $20 it’s very good value, but it doesn’t seem to meet quite the same quality level as CrazyBump. What says the Internet? Any other suggestions?
June 9th, 2009 at 6:00 am
I say both are the devil and to get a wacom and hand paint the heightmap!
Run that through the nvidia normalmap generator and bam, a *real* normalmap. But I guess you’re going to pull out the ‘but I’m just a poor programmer’ card 
I constantly fight with our artist because he loves crazybump and I hate the rubbery, plastic, not quite right results of all 2d to 3d generators. I think he loves it because it’s so damn easy, but he normalmaps *everything* including flat signs
June 9th, 2009 at 9:58 am
*sigh* Yes, I’m a poor programmer. Actually, scratch that, I’m a poor *lazy* programmer
If you want normal mapped stick figures, I’m your man, but anything beyond that is out of my depth.
The reason I’m liking CrazyBump is precisely because I think it’s *not* giving me plasticky results, whereas ShaderMap Pro seems to. And hey, if your artist likes it, I can’t be that much of a clueless programmer
June 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I’ve been suggested PixPlant2 as an alternative for $179. Apart from not generating AO maps (which I don’t need anyway), the quality seems on par with CrazyBump, and it has some extra features too for extracting repeating textures from images.
And, rather amusingly, I discovered it uses OGRE to render the previews!
June 9th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Wow, just had a look at the PixPlant website, and I must say the auto-tiling of textures looks really good too. I hate having to create tiling textures manually.
This one impressed me the most.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Hehe, yes I’m exaggerating slightly, but yes crazybump with a good source image can produce nice results. Just be carefull of the temptation to normalmap things just because you can
I’m going to check out xNormal with 4 different lit source images. Much more work but potentially quite accurate.
June 10th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I’m going to suggest a free, open source alternative.
There is a GIMP normal map plugin
http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/normalmap/
It has a variety of different algorithms you can check, some producing higher or lower frequency normal maps.
It may not be ShaderMap or CrazyBump, but it’s worth the try.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
It looks like you’ve got the specular level turned up really high on ShaderMap. You should probably decrease the brightness of your specular map. Also I’m guessing that you are using the demo version of SMP. This limits your preview resolution (and thus your detail).
Here are some screens of ShaderMap Pro creating normal maps from stones.
ShaderMap Stones with Diffuse.
ShaderMap Stones without Diffuse.
You can see ShaderMap is quite good at picking up the detail from images.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I did play with all the settings in both systems, and ShaderMap always came up with muddier results. It could very well be that it was the fact that the demo was limited in resolution, in which case my main recommendation to you is to ditch that limit, because it just gives the impression when trialling it that ShaderMap Pro’s results are inferior, which if they’re not then it’s underselling itself. Maybe you should just watermark or something instead?
In the end it was all moot for me because I ended up getting a free copy of PixPlant2, because it uses Ogre (which I wrote),and I’m very happy with its results.