AwesomeBump vs Forge Material Studio

AwesomeBump creates material textures from a single image, including normal, height, specular, ambient occlusion, metallic and roughness maps. It can convert normal maps to height maps and height maps to normal maps, as well as extract bump information from an image. Other tools include seamless texture creation, perspective transformation, real-time tessellation, grunge maps, material textures and bump-map mixing. The maker says 99% of image processing happens on the GPU, with parameters adjustable in real time. Images can be saved as PNG, JPG, BMP or TGA. The project is free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 or later, with support for Windows, Linux and macOS. The README links Windows 5.1 binaries for Windows 7, 8 and 10, and Linux builds for Ubuntu 18 and Ubuntu 14. Build instructions require graphics hardware supporting OpenGL 4.0; an OpenGL 3.3 build is available without tessellation. The README also warns that the current CMake script does not work.

Forge Material Studio is a local-first tool for authoring procedural PBR materials on the web or Windows. Its node graph builds tileable materials from components such as cloud noise, Voronoi, gradients, bricks, math, blending, and normal nodes. It can also convert PNG, JPEG, or WebP albedo images into editable base-color, height, normal, roughness, metallic, and ambient-occlusion maps. A live Babylon.js preview shows materials on a sphere, cube, plane, or production-style model, with full-result and channel views. Work can be done at 512, 1024, or 2048 pixels while preserving the source aspect ratio. Projects are stored in IndexedDB with recovery, generated-map caching, undo and redo, and keyboard save shortcuts. Exports include individual PNG maps or validated .mmpack packages with baked maps, the source graph, a manifest, and an export report. The standalone viewer opens these packages in browser memory. The tool has no account system, telemetry, or material upload service. It is free under the MIT License, which permits commercial use if the copyright and license notice remain with the software.