Hey everyone! Its been what feels like forever since my last post, but things have been pretty hectic these days. Anyways, back to why you are here!
Have you ever gotten to a point where you have a really nice Diffuse/Albedo texture that you want to use for a game object in your game but don't have any other maps to go with it? You know, the Height, Normal, Ambient Occlusion and blah..blah...blah, those ones!!
I have mentioned before about how to do this in GIMP downloading some plugin and working through some of the filters and adjustments of the image to get these, but what if I told you there is an easier and far better way to do this?!
Probably the same reaction I had...So how much do I need to pay for this thing? The best part about that is its free! Yup, with one piece of software you can go through and build your texture maps and export them out into your game or make that amazing game asset you have been working on.
The software is called Materialize, and it does exactly what it sounds like it does. It allows you to build your full materials by generating your maps and tweaking them as needed. Just about any image you can think of can be converted into your needed texture maps!
When you first open it up you will most likely be a little confused on what to do, but there are some great tutorials on their site and once you get the hang of each one, you will be building texture maps in no time and pushing your game development to the next level!
You could be an artist painting these really nice textures and in need of converting them over to the rest of your maps. Open up Materialize and let the software build it for you! The best part is you can watch and see how these will all look while you are creating them!
Side Note: Don't forget that you can build normal maps within Blender by baking your high poly models into a low poly model! Create a flat plane to use for your low poly and bake the high poly into it, then just export out your normal map and use it in your game.
The more and more you research on free and open source tools for game design, the more you realize that you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year just to make the game content that you want!