Useful graphic apps

[dedmin]

Anyone knows of an environment map viewer? One where you can test out the maps live in 3d?

http://developer.amd.com/gpu/cubemapgen/Pages/default.aspx

[thomthom]

Anyone knows of an environment map viewer? One where you can test out the maps live in 3d?

http://developer.amd.com/gpu/cubemapgen/Pages/default.aspx

Only supports cross maps?

[EscapeArtist]

Not really apps, but these sites are very useful for rendering IOR and other material values:

http://www.pixelandpoly.com/ior.html
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Techni ... xList.html
http://refractiveindex.info/?group=CRYSTALS&material=Si

[tridem]

SMARTNORMAL (free) quick normalmap generator, also web based

smartnormal.jpg

[Pilou]

Xnormal (free)

xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps. It can also project the texture of the highpoly model into the lowpoly mesh ( complete texture transfer, even with different topologies ).

Includes too an interactive 3D viewer with multiple mesh and textures format support, shaders and realtime soft shadows / glow effect.

It comes with some useful tools like height map - normal map - cavity map - occlusion - tangent/object space and spherical harmonics tools.

All these computations are done using multicore/multithreading, distributed/parallel rendering, ray tracing and advanced GPGPU techniques.

[solo]

Sculptris (Thanks to pilou on another thread)

http://sculptris.com/

Gave it a quick try and I'm amazed that this product is free.

Not only can you sculpt organic shapes like an artist/sculptor, it also allows you to map UV's and export them with model, so importing into SU your model is fully mapped.

[EarthMover]

Whoa....Scultpris is AWESOME. Zbrush lite! My son was just asking me for an app to do sculpting. This is perfect!

[EarthMover]

Sculptris (Thanks to pilou on another thread)

http://sculptris.com/

Gave it a quick try and I'm amazed that this product is free.

Not only can you sculpt organic shapes like an artist/sculptor, it also allows you to map UV's and export them with model, so importing into SU your model is fully mapped.

Pete,

How are you getting the mesh back into Sketchup?

[solo]

Sculptris -> deep exploration -> SU

[Pilou]

For the little story Sculptris is now hosted by Zbrush (Pixologic) and the creator Dr Petter is now in Pixologic team (creator of Zbrush)
Whishing it stay free

[EarthMover]

It's a shame I can't get Scultpris to work with TIG's .obj importer plugin. The polyreducer brush, voxel like sculpting and texture painting would make a great free workflow addition for most sketchup users. If anyone can make it work, please let me know. I've tried all settings.

[Pilou]

Try Meshlab(free)

[EarthMover]

I did it also with Blender, but lost the UV's. (Probably naming and file issue) I'll try Meshlab. Sculptris works great with an already made SDS mesh. I just made a nice cushion! Can't figure out why TIG's importer won't work though.

(Sorry for taking up this thread. I'll find another thread for just Sculptris issues)

[solo]

Adam

You never lost the UV's, it's not exported with model (notice no mtl file) you need to export texture out seperately.

[EarthMover]

I see! Thanks Pete!

Came across this one today - Artizen HDR - http://www.supportingcomputers.net/Appl ... rtizen.asp

"From real to surreal, Artizen HDR is a Windows based stand alone image editing application that has a complete set of state of the art technologies that makes working with photographs easier than ever. Artizen is full featured photo editor with ability to work with JPEG's, +14 Digital Camera RAW files and High Dynamic Range images in an easy and efficient manner suitable for both professionals and hobbyist photographers."

Free for 8 bit image editing!!

[Simon B]

Visual Color Picker does exactly what it says =)

[Gaieus]

Thanks James, impressive list!

I already use some of them but there's indeed a bunch to discover...

[solo]

This looks cool, for Photoshop.

http://www.niksoftware.com/colorefexpro/usa/entry.php

[Zacchia]

sure this is very helpful if you work with a lot of files:
http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/index.asp
You can see all files as small tumbnails. It reads different files and you can also save them as different. Also convert files with batch command or polygon reduce with batch command and much more is possilbe. I could not be without it!

[majid]

http://www.artweaver.de/ is ignored.... simple and powerfull painting application for free

[Pixero]

Found this free photoshop plugin for normal map creation: http://cgted.com/

[solo]

Nice find Pixero.

[pichuneke]

Plugin for Gimp for normal map creation:

http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/

(Only free software, as always )

By the way, do you know how to turn a normal map into a bump map? I want to use Bitmap to Mesh with a normal map, but first I have to turn it into a bump map...

[Pixero]

By the way, do you know how to turn a normal map into a bump map? I want to use Bitmap to Mesh with a normal map, but first I have to turn it into a bump map...

Converting a normal map to a bumpmap/heightmap/displacementmap isnt so easy.
You can maybe fake it either by converting the normalmap to grayscale or using the blue channel as a base.
There are some programs that can do it rather well:

http://www.crazybump.com/
Commercial, good but kind of expensive.

http://www.xnormal.net/Downloads.aspx
Free? Can convert normalmap to cavity map but that isnt really a heightmap more like a occlusion map.

http://shadermap.com/
Free command line version or commercial (19.95) pro version with UI.
Here is some examples with Shadermap:

nlinsample.jpg

nlinsample_DISP.jpg

[pichuneke]

Thanks Pixero. It seems that Shadermap is what I am looking for (as I do my work for free, with free tools).

[Pilou]

Chaoscope
The more easiest program : 3 keys F3,F4 ESCAPE
Maybe a day it will gives the 3D Export
Usefull for make crazzy background

Click image if scroll bar

chaos.jpg

[Al Hart]

By the way, do you know how to turn a normal map into a bump map? I want to use Bitmap to Mesh with a normal map, but first I have to turn it into a bump map...

[Edit - I presumed you wanted to turn a mesh into a bump map - I may have answered the wrong question.]

We wrote a (not free) app to turn a mesh into a bump-map. The trick is to look at the mesh from head on and make the closer faces either brighter or darker. A bump map does not have colors, but uses intensity of gray scale to represent Z-distance offsets.

We did this by extracting all the faces and running them through an OpenGL renderer which turned the distance from the camera into shading intensity. This worked well, but it was hard to find a good application for it.

You might be able to get a similar effect by making the object white, using a parallel projection, turning off all lighting, turning off edges, and adding fog. Then the amount of fog should represent the distance from the camera plane, and product the bump map.

[shura]

Thanks for sharing Pilou, Chaoscope is really beautiful!

[Gaieus]

You might be able to get a similar effect by making the object white, using a parallel projection, turning off all lighting, turning off edges, and adding fog. Then the amount of fog should represent the distance from the camera plane, and product the bump map.

I have made reasonable displacement maps like this actually. Best is to use hidden line face style (to get rid of face shading completely) and hide all edges in the style panel.

You may want to exaggerate the geometry a little bit to get the desired effect with the fog but grouping the whole thing and scaling along the Z axis makes it easy.

[notareal]

http://www.holmes3d.net/graphics/meshman/

What is MeshMan?

MeshMan is a 3D modeling tool. It loads and manipulates 3D mesh geometry in a few useful ways. It supports multiple subdivision schemes for smoothing a mesh, decimation for thinning a mesh, transforms for rotating, scaling, or translating a mesh, can tessellate a mesh into triangles, and supports a few other minor manipulations.

The primary file format MeshMan works with is the OFF format, a simple format for storing 3D data. For more information on the OFF format, see the pages for my RoffView OFF viewing program and the related OFF Tools page. MeshMan works only with the most basic type of OFF files and does not load the texture coordinates that RoffView can handle. This is because handling that extra data is beyond the scope of MeshMan's manipulations. MeshMan can also open simple OBJ files, and can export to several other formats, including STL and PLY.