Ever wanted to generate normal maps?

[matheus23]

For generating normal maps there are several tools available... "available"...:
Bitmap2material: $149
Nvidia's Photoshop Plugin: You need Photoshop (~$800)

But finally I searched for a normalmap generator for GIMP, and this is what I found:
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/#Overview

It's truly awesome... (I'm on Archlinux here, quickly installed the tool with $ yaourt -S gimp-plugin-normalmap, started gimp, and it was there...)

Using the plugin is extremely easy:


You can then specify options:


You can even let it perview the bumpmapped image with lighting as a quad, sphere, torus, whatever:


With this tool I converted for example this carpet image:

Into this normal map for it:


[size=20pt]These guys did a great job![/size]

[davedes]

Here is another excellent tool:
http://www.crazybump.com/

NVidia's Photoshop plugin results in a lot of noise. Each tool leads to different results.. Test them out to see which works best for your images.