CrazyBump

CrazyBump is a professional software program that bundles a rich-featured suite of editing tools for helping users create high-quality textured maps.

It sports a clean and intuitive layout that allows you to open a texture from an image file or heightmap item, or upload a normal map from your computer for applying further editing operations.

You are allowed to pick the texture wrapping mode, namely vertical, horizontal, or both options.

CrazyBump works with a wide range of file formats: TIF, TGA, SGI, PNG, PSD, JPG, ICO, DCX, EMF, BMP, RAW, SUN, VIC, IMG, and many others.

After you have chosen the texture, the program automatically transforms the image using the shape recognition process and provides two opposite versions of the texture.

You can select the desired texture and proceed with creating a map using five different options, Normals, Displacement, Occlusion, Specularity (determine the amount of specular reflectivity a surface has), and Difuse (remove shades and highlights).

What’s more, you can zoom in or out and preview the texture in a 3D working environment where you are allowed to enable special effects (e.g. diffuse texture, parallax displacement, colored lights), pick the displaying mode (ball, column, roller, box) or load the mesh from a file (e.g. OBJ, ASE), and rotate the texture to different angles.

CrazyBump features several editing parameters for the normal maps, which are built specifically for helping you tweak the intensity of the texture, sharpen the image for enhancing textures, remove some of the noise and smooth out shaded areas, and use the “Shape recognition” function for enhancing white or dark areas.

Plus, you can use of the four built-in modes, namely fine, medium, large, or very large detail, for adding greater contrast to certain areas.

Last but not least, you can copy the map to the clipboard or export it to different file formats, such as BMP, DCM, TGA, RAW, EMF, DCX, PSD, PPM, TGA, JPG, and others.

The tool offers support for batch operations, which means you can add multiple photos and process them at the same time. You can also save the current settings to a file for uploading them in your future projects.

During our testing we have noticed that CrazyBump carries out a task very quickly, offers excellent output results, and no errors showed up throughout the entire process. However, it eats up CPU and memory, so the overall performance of the computer may be hampered.

CrazyBump proves to be a reliable application that provides a complete suite of tools for helping you generate displacement, normal, occlusion, and specular maps based on 2D images.