Awesome Bump Review

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Review of Awesome Bump powered by the Slant community.

AwesomeBump is a free and open source program written using Qt library designed to generate normal, height, specular or ambient occlusion, metallic, roughness textures from a single image. Additional features like material textures or grunge maps are available. Since the image processing is done in 99% on GPU the program runs very fast and all the parameters can be changed in real time. AB was made to be a new alternative to known gimp plugin called Insane Bump or commercial tool: Crazy Bump.

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What are the best programs for making height maps, normal maps, and/or other maps?

Pros

Pro
Feature complete

Supports great features, such as the addition of grunge maps, supports tessellation, and has a beautiful 3d view port.

Pro
Free and open-source

Being open source, along with the price of nothing makes this software very compelling to use.

Pro
Cross platform

This software is cross platform, so you can integrate it into your work flow without worrying to much about your operating system (Linux, Mac, and Windows).

Cons

Con
Confusing

The first few times using the software, you may have a hard time getting what you want. That is mostly due to the slew of features, and slightly confusing interface.

Con
Doesn't run on MacOS

Con
Requires open GL 3.30 or higher

Although the pbr view port looks great, it does come with the drawback that you will have to have support for open GL 3.30 or higher, and set it up before hand (if its not already set up on your computer).