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Add to SafariWhen comparing Awesome Bump vs Materialize, the Slant community recommends Awesome Bump for most people. In the question“What are the best programs for making height maps, normal maps, and/or other maps?” Awesome Bump is ranked 1st while Materialize is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Awesome Bump is:
Supports great features, such as the addition of grunge maps, supports tessellation, and has a beautiful 3d view port.
Question Ranking
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).
Pro Presets
A few simple presets available, that generally do a good job if you want a quick and dirty generation.
Pro Integrated mask feature
You can create up to two masks to define metalness or any area you want the software to look at a little differently.
Pro Clear interface
A nice clean and clear interface, where it is much easier to know what you are doing.
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).
Con Maps are derivative of one another
... Meaning you will always lose some quality. You can test this for yourself in real time by generating a height map from a normal, then clearing the normal and generating a new one based on height, then clearing the previous height map and generating a new one based on the new normal. Obviously, no one would do that, but it effectively demonstrates that Materialize, by its nature, sacrifices the accuracy that other programs can guarantee you.
Con Slow image preview in file browser
Although the texture generation and preview is butter smooth, other GUI things, like image previews in the file browser cause huge slowdowns and jittering.
Con Not Standalone
You need Unity.
Con While the filters are nice, you are limited to two colors
This is easily Materialize's biggest limitation. Even the most basic diffuse maps have more than two tones, so for the third tone and beyond, the height map generator just takes over the wheel and drives over a cliff.
This drawback means the program is only really helpful for basic, one- or two-tone materials like stone impressions, brick walls, simple fabric patterns, etc.
It also means the gloss/roughness generator is operating in completely the wrong frame of mind. If you have a material like tire rubber with sections that are muddy, wet, snow-crusted, blood splattered, etc. Materialize is only going to let you select two tones to make glossy or rough, and the other twelve are anybody's guess as to how reflective or absorbent they'll be.
