UBER 1337 PROGRAM

This thing is just awesome, in my opinion

http://www.crazybump.com/

Here is an example of it on TDR's Shadow Efreet
I forgot to do a texture adjustment in the program to remove texture shading, though








An example of it on Olofmoleman's Lindormr Dragon


This could be useful for any of the people here in the Dominance War

I don't know how to get occlusion maps into 3ds Max so, really, with the occlusion map, it looks better

Main issue with this program would be seams

damn, that's indeed pretty awesome. It's fantastic for tilable textures. Though for more complex things, like characters or creatures, it's still much better to use a high res model to extract the data from. Also the ambient occlusion pretty much sucks in this program, it's really fake. If you want high quality occlusion maps, use XNormal. But overall, this is an excellent program! Bye-bye photoshop normal map filter!

I've had that program for a while now, but I don't model much at all anymore, so I have barely touched it. But yeah, it seems to be quite awesome yes :)

You hit it straight on, actually. For example, let's take your texture on your Shadow Efreet. It's basically seamless, but if you zoom in a lot there's a tiny seam. The normal map this program generates exaggerates the seam a lot and makes it very noticeable. So yeah, for characters and such high res models are better. But it's still nice for lazy peeps like me xD

Oh, how do I get occlusion maps into 3ds Max? xD Under materials there's not an occlusion part

Or it might just make seams at UV separations in general

We use crazy bump at school. :P :3

Oh, to fix the seams you could just put the actual normal map viewed as the model's diffuse in 3ds Max and bake it on areas that do have seems so you can blend all the crap in

Here's an example of it without the texture

man, that's terrible...really, it sucks BAD, REALLY BAD. This will never ever replace sculpting as it is in this stage. But as I said, it's divine for tilable textures.