Intro to crazy bump part 1 - 2 - 3 by Brian Swanson
Most of the sliders are self-explanatory.
One disadvantage of crazy bump is that it doesn't understand textures as we do, darkened spots on the texture will be interpreted as depth so if you have dark dirt or smudges on your texture you should expect them to sink in or you could attempt to alleviate this effect by editing it in photoshop a little bit before importing it to crazybump.
The normal map is the first thing you want to work on in Crazybump as that will affect how the rest of the maps are rendered. On each tab the normal sliders will be present but you shouldn't tamper with them once you've sorted it out in the beginning.
They displacement, occlusion, specular and diffuse tabs each have their own sliders which you can use to change how those individual maps appear.
The shape recognition slider determines how much the normal is affected by the diffuse. At 0 the normal is based from the displacement map, the more you slide it up toward 100 the more it takes highlights and shadows from the diffuse map.
The fine, medium, large and very large detail sliders change how pronounced the details of those sizes are, so the very large slider will affect how curvaceous things appear to be whereas the fine detail will slider will help you to gain detail in the very small dots or tight scratches of your texture.
Displacement
The displacement edits you make will not appear in the 3D preview.
Enhance detail slider for the displacement map will reduce the overall effect but will make the smaller detail more apparent.
Occlusion
The Power slider will change the intensity of the effect, ramping it up to 100 will make it more contrasting, more black and white. At 0 you get more mid-tones with fewer highlights and shadows, and at 100 you get a lot more white with only the darkest details showing up as black and greys.
Enhance detail works similar to the displacement map slider of the same name. Larger, softer shadows toward 0 and sharper crisper smaller shadows toward 100.
Specularity
Texture influence - Lower more influence from displacement map, higher more influence from diffuse.
Metallic color - Negative and positive values will tint the specular map orange and blue respectively.
Diffuse
Remove shading and highlights sliders attempt to brighten dark areas and darken bright spots to help you keep it a flat texture just for color information.
3D crevices intensifies existing shadows for a sort of crude shadow effect.
3D highlights does the opposite. Brightening existing highlights to make them pop out.
Color correction is similar to the effect auto levels has in photoshop, correcting the overall level of brightness.
Here are the maps I generated for this wood texture.
color
displacement
normal
occlusion
specularA quick way to generate normals is to make your own displacement map in photoshop. This might be easier as you can make very quickly smooth transitions from one height to another by using the gradient tool.
Once you're done with that you can import the image into crazybump and it'll create your normal map for you.
In this little test I've just made a quick displacement map in photoshop and imported it to Crazybump.
