Bitmap2material review

Putting B2M to the test

Additional maps created via the Bitmap2Material Substance node

Version 1.5 of B2M provides key updates in the area of detail control. With this new version you now have the ability to do things like sharpen edge detail on bump, height, and normal maps, and also use custom maps for bitmap height, and bitmap details. These new features give the user more control for fine tuning.

To test B2M’s performance, I started off by creating two rather simple scenes. I approached the first scene as a test in getting used to the UI and the B2M workflow. The second scene was more directed towards pushing B2M’s performance to see how much detail it could pull from textures that did not have a great deal of contrast.

For the initial scene, I chose a good candidate to get a quick sense of how well B2M works: a 3.5k image that had a good amount contrast and depth to it. I created a box, applied a material, and then gave it some bump and specularity by plugging the specular, normal, and bump channels outputted by the B2M Substance map into the corresponding map channels. Without any adjustments or fine tuning I hit render and sure enough the normal, bump, and specularity maps were working fine. Not bad for creating these additional maps on the fly.

First test scene showing the Bitmap2Material
shader tree

With the amount of control one has over things like normal recognition angle and smoothing, specular levels, and more, one gets a real sense of how powerful B2M can be. Having the ability to access all these parameters inside Max speeds up your workflow significantly. It allows you to adjust your shaders quickly, and without having to update or change multiple maps one at a time.

For the second scene, I quickly threw together some primitives and lights, and proceeded to build some materials. This is where I wanted to see how B2M would handle pulling bump, normal, height, and specularity maps, from textures that varied in contrast. I decided to use a total of three materials in this scene, each with increasing contrast. For the first I chose a concrete texture which offered little contrast or variation in colour, the second was a rock pathway which gave me some nice variations in colour and contrast to play with, and for the third I chose a dry, cracked dirt texture which has some really nice contrast in it.

Second test – multiple Bitmap2Material substances

Normal and bump detail created by Bitmap2Material

For the most part B2M handled these images as I had expected; textures with more contrast and color variations offered the most flexibility when it came to building a more realistic shader. The concrete texture which had little contrast, didn’t perform as well and provided me with maps that didn’t have as much detail as the other two did. As you can judge from the render on the right above, B2M can add a lot of detail to your shaders simply by utilizing one texture map.

Fine Control

Bitmap2Material fine control settings

No tiling on the left vs Bitmap2Material’s MakeItTile feature on the right

One key area to note, is the fine tuning you have access to when using B2M. There are multiple controls for dialing in various channels like, diffuse, specular, AO, and normals, which allow you to really get in there and create a look to your shader that works best for you. There is also the option of using the height map generated by B2M to drive some displacement which can bring even more detail to your geometry.

MakeItTile

For any of us who have had to create seamless textures, we know it usually involves taking our texture into a program such as Photoshop, creating a new seamless version of that texture, and then bringing it back into our 3d scene.

With B2M, Allegorithmic has eliminated these extra steps. MakeItTile offers two methods for erasing visible seams. An Offset method, which as its name implies offsets the tiles so that the seams don’t match up, and a Splat method, which uses the idea of ‘patching’ your tiled map seams with bits and pieces grabbed from the texture itself.

Both methods yield good results and help eliminate visible seams when repeating your textures. Being able to complete this function in 3DS Max, and on the fly, is a really great feature. If you use a lot of textures that are not tiled by default then I highly suggest giving B2M a look. It saves countless steps of going back and forth between 3DS Max and your image editing program of choice.

Texture Resolution Tools

Bitmap2Material’s texture resolution tools

Another feature that comes in handy when using B2M is the texture resolution or size parameters that enable you to switch resolution on the fly. This allows the user to lower the size of textures by 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc., which is useful for preview renders where you don’t need to see the full resolution texture. Being able to decrease resolution when needed without having to create proxy textures is a really nice feature. Rendering objects up close could use the full texture resolution, while objects in the back could use a copied material with lower texture resolution.

Substance Player

Finally, let’s take a closer look at the Substance Player, which comes as part of the B2M installation. As mentioned earlier, B2M is part of the bigger Substance framework, and that also includes the Substance Player, a complete 3D viewer that allows you to preview what a Substance will look like before you build it. Loading the Bitmap2Material.sbsar file into the Substance Player will create a 3D cube, upon which you can drag and drop your texture onto. Once in the player, you can adjust the normal, the specularity, etc., to get a real sense of how your Substance will look once rendered in 3DS Max. The Substance Player also allows you to export the texture maps created by B2M, which gives you the ability to use them in another package. Another useful tool in case you need to send a set of textures to someone who does not have access to B2M.