Tuesday, September 30th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Allegorithmic releases Bitmap2Material 3

Allegorithmic has released Bitmap2Material 3, the latest version of its normal-mapping and texture-editing toolkit for games artists, adding in support for a physically based rendering workflow.

Support for PBR workflows
Bitmap2Material enables users to convert photographic source images into standard games texture maps – now including PBR channels like albedo, metallic and roughness, plus normal and ambient occlusion.

As the video above shows, generating a metallic map is a semi-automated process, with sliders controlling roughness and glossiness.

Automated light cancellation and texture tiling
There are also some pretty neat tools for automatically removing shadows from a source photo to create a usable colour/albedo map; and for generating tileable texures, supporting offset and splat tiling.

The materials generated can be viewed in any game or preview engine that supports physically based shading, such as Marmoset Toolbag 2 or Unreal Engine 4.

Pricing and availability
Bitmap2Material is available now for Windows and Mac OS X. An Indie licence costs $49; a Pro licence, which enables you to use B2M in 3ds Max, Maya, Modo, Unity and Unreal Engine 4, costs $149.

Read more about the new features in Bitmap2Material 3 on Allegorithmic’s website