ShaderMap Pro $20 for all your textures

[Gare]

Several of us make bump maps by hand for our 3D scene needs, and I've been one of us. But Barbara came across an applet called Shader Map Pro, that not only auto-creates displacement maps (which are more refined and complex than bump maps), specularity maps (which can be used to mask areas that should be shiny or rough), ambient occlusion maps (good for simulating a gritty textures), and normal maps.

The thing was $20, perpetual free upgrades. Plus there's a free command line version, a nice spirit of sharing, but not awfully useful when you want a live preview. You can preview your own model with the texture you're working on, or default to a cylinder.

Shader Map Pro

Not that the maps it generates can't use a little hand-tweaking in Photoshop before using them, but this is a terrific product for novices and experts alike. Normal maps are very important when you're displacing a surface—they explicitly direct the modeler what to render in which direction and can actually prevent artifacting. MapZone can generate a normal map from a preset texture and it's free, but Shader Map Pro offers flexibility to work with your own textures very quickly.

Here's a homage to Escher.

My Best,

Gary

[Spinland]

Yep, this looks awesome; just bought it. My cheap trick for faking it is making a greyscale version of the original texture and adjusting the lightness a little. Never know when being able to make a "proper" one will come in handy!

Thanks for the tip!

[Gare]

First, you're helping to support an Indie programmer, Mark, so you should feel good about it. Nearest competitor is $90 and I will not grace our forum with Brand X's true name (and it doesn't work as well as Shader Map).

Second: yes, before I discovered displacement mapping utils I, too, used to greyscale the original color map and then blur t a litte to avoid really spikey transitions off the surface of the model.

But look at my attachment below. SahdeMap Pro eases the transitions between light and dark in a very sophisticated way, more so than one could paint manually.

Additionally, ShaderMap Pro can generate Specular and Ambient Occlusion maps, that when put in a texture channel for the corresponding property, can add realism and a lot of nice grittiness. And you can control the excursion of the surface away from the model by using the Normal Map. You have to have these channels in your rendering program, though" I know Poser has some, and Lightwave should if it doesn't!

displacement.jpg (24.65 KiB) Viewed 1061 times

[Spinland]

Awesome! I confess I haven't yet had time to play with it since I bought it, but the recent Jedi Dragon experiment had me really disappointed in the included bump maps. There wasn't any sense of "bumpiness" to the scales as the textures came stock. Yeah, Lightwave's materials editor has a ton of channels, each of which can accept parameters, envelopes and/or texture maps. I already made a note to myself to re-visit the dragon mapping with this app and see if I can't do better than the Poser maps.

Helping reward the indie who made this available is icing on the cake.