Materialize Beta 1.6

I have been pretty busy as of late but I got a chance to update my material from image tool. I had this posted over on the unity3d sub on reddit but I think it's far enough along to get some broader feedback.

http://www.boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/signup.php



Some people need to run the shortcut as administrator, this can be done by right clicking the shortcut and selecting "Run as administrator"

There was an earlier issue with the installer linked on the website being an incorrect version and not installing a re-distributable necessary for image importing. If anyone has image import problems re-download and re-install.

 

This looks great. I think this tool could be really useful to developers.

 

Since the question will inevitably come up I think you should take the initiative of adressing what your program provides that the established tools for that task don't. Do you want me to post a list of the ones I know? I think knowing your competition well is the key to provide a product that fills a need the others don't.

 

@boundingbox
Looking very good, following this tread with lots of interest

Is this standalone of Unity in editor running ?

 

Installation process seems pretty counter intuitive. Ran Materialize.exe from web site. It installed the launcher but didn't put anything on desktop or menu. Went hunting in and found a launcher in Program Files(x86) / materialize directory. Then had to run launcher as admin in the program files / materialize directory. That's probably going to stump a bunch of people and certainly made me uneasy from a virus perspective (no offence intended).

 

@AdamGoodrich that is a reasonable opinion and can most certainly be concerning, maybe an oversight, let see what the publisher reply with with regards to this.

 

There was an earlier issue with the installer linked on the website being an incorrect version and not installing a re-distributable necessary for image importing. If anyone has image import problems re-download and re-install.

I agree. It should be putting a shortcut in the start menu. I will look for an alternative for the thing causing the run as administrator issue.

This is a standalone program made in unity.

It produces much better results than CrazyBump $100-$300, and probably similar results to Bitmap2Material $100-$150, but will be priced at $30 personal use, $100 professional use. So better/similar results for less money.

 

@boundingbox
At those price tags, do you have a feature list that would indicate the included features between the two different mentioned version?

 

The features will be the same. It's just more if you use it professionally, scouts honor. Most reputable studios will buy professional licenses of things because they legally have to. I believe it is the same deal with CrazyBump and Bitmap2Material.

 

To be honest I don't really feel like this answers my question. "Better" can be pretty subjective unless you provide A/B comparisons between your app and the established ones. What about NDO (50$ for hobby/freelance use)? It offers Photoshop integration and the ability to create normal maps or details from scratch on top of the whole maps from photos thing. And you have mindtex (15$ or 20$ I don't know) at the low end price range. And then there is Knald (100$ freelance and non-commercial) which is really fast because it is GPU based.
I don't fully understand what your target audience is. My impression from professional 3D artists is that they don't really care if your program is 30$ or 100$, they care if it can do anything better or at least faster than any of the 2-3 programs they already have for that kind of task. It feels to me if your target demographic is "people who don't already have any of the tools that do basically the same thing" you are limiting the prospect of success for your product in an unhealthy way.
Don't get me wrong, I want you to succeed with your product and I want you to keep working on it. I just think it might be important to plan and communicate a bit better what sets your program apart from all the other tools already established at the market. Will yours be the easiest to use? The fastest? The one with the best batch processing capabilities? And I think the best way to find your way here is to take a very close look at all the other programs first.

 

I built a tool that I would and do use. I have CrazyBump and found that I had to bring everything I got out of it back into Photoshop to edit because it just wasn't there. I'd have to compile multiple depth maps to get a decent displacement map and overlay blurred versions of the normal map to get the robust shapes I wanted. I made Materialize to do all the stuff I was doing in Photoshop automatically.

The command list features allow you to optimize your workflow. I was doing some work on a game and we needed to overhaul a lot of materials in a short amount of time, 10,000+ in a month. The command list was added to jump start the material making process. The command list we sent to Materialize opened the original diffuse and normal map, generated ao and edge maps, and set quicksave locations for the new diffuse, normal, and property map (the main texture we were after). This let us update most materials in under a minute, and get everything done on time.

I have not used B2M but from the videos I've seen it looks good, and if you are happy with it keep using it. You are right that many professional artists don't care about the price of a tool but there are some frugal artists out there. The high end artists aren't going to use one program for everything and certainly aren't going to be making a finished material from a single image. They're going to be sculpting stuff and jumping between 10 different programs to use some feature that each one has that they like. My target audience is anyone who trys it and likes it for whatever reason. Maybe they like how a certain map is generated, or just want to make something quickly and easily, or they are just too cheap to splurge on a more expensive program.

If you try it out and and have any suggestions on features you'd like to have or ways of making the workflow more efficient I'm all ears.

 

That sounds reasonable. Good to hear it already got used on a larger scale on your own projects. I can see how it's useful to shape the program with the real world needs your own usecase has and from the sound of it you are building it to be a powerful batch tool. I'll check it out when I'll be working on textures again. At the moment I try to not get distracted by graphics tasks.
Personally I only own MindTex, DDO, NDO, Substance Designer and Substance Painter. I had tried a trial of b2m and it had somewhat usable features to make a non tilable image tilable and then generate the textures from (might have been improved since then). If you can manage that I think it is a worthwile addition because most tools still aren't good at that and it would be a powerful tool to just crunch a non tiling photo texture archive through batch processing and then conveniently browse through the resulting tiled textures, automatically applied to a preview mesh. Just some thoughts.
I'm looking forward to see how Materialize will grow in the future!


Edit: Just saw in a video you already got a way to make things tile. Guess I really should check it out some time.

 

I uploaded an update which fixes some issues people were having.

Post process now auto focuses.
File name can now be typed in for saving and loading files.
Thumbnails & previews for projects can be seen if there was a diffuse map saved with that project. Except for bmp right now because I forgot.
Full screen button has been disabled due to a bug in the latest version of unity.

The installer on the website now defaults to "c: \BoundingBox" for its default location. Installing to program files is what makes people have to run it as administrator for anything to happen. There are other options to fix the administrator issue but this is the simplest one that keeps windows from asking weird questions. I tried having the launcher write to the app data folder but windows still asks if you want to run the program if it is not digitally signed.

 

So far it works great and performance is great!

 

This is more of a personal request, but could you share a shader that works with all the maps inside unity?

 

Hi, whenever I try to download this I get an empty response error.

 

I had the same problem...!
But than I run it as Admin
and allow the tool acces via Anti-Virus...!
Right now it´s downloading... ^^

EDIT:

Okay, it downloads the necessary files...
But if I want to start this application... It crashed... :--/
Microsoft Windows Standard Crash Window...!?!

 

Yes, I will add some Unreal and Unity shaders up on the site..

If you install to Program Files it will give you grief if you don't run it as administrator. Installing it anywhere else, preferably in its own directory away from user documents and system stuff.

Can you give me any more info? What version of windows are you on?

 

Thank you very much!

 

Nothing special... :---/
It´s just saying that the exe. is not working anymore...!
It´s looking for an solution... Windoof... xD

I´m using Vista Ultima 64bit

 

I don't even get to the point where I get to install anything, I can't access http://www.boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/download/Materialize.exe for whatever reasons.

 

Like you can't download it?

 

Yeah, that's it. Tried downloading it at my university today and that worked just fine, though. Weird.

 

When you share them on the site, could you notify us?

 

Will do, getting everything ready on the website side this week, then implementing some suggestions.

That is weird, what country are you in?

 

Germany. I didn't try rebooting/closing and reopening the browser, though. I think that might fix it. Anyway, I managed to download it and I'm impressed. It's definitely much better than crazy bump in many ways and I see a lot of potential. A few things that I noticed:
- Left-clicking doesn't do anything with the model, which is sort of counter-intuitive, so what was the reason you made it that way?
- Am I missing something or is it really not possible to edit maps while viewing the full material?
- Are you going to implement more advanced tiling features such as a height based blend?
- Is it possible to smooth the edges of the isolation mask when using color samples?
- A "Do you want to save before quitting?" dialogue seems like a good idea.

Generally, I found it pretty straightforward to use. Got reasonably pleasant results out of it within 10 minutes without looking at any tutorials. It'd be even easier to get into if you included a kind of "start here" interface, sort of like in crazybump. All in all, I really like this, though. Good job!