AwesomeBump vs Knald

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.

Knald is a standalone GPU-powered application for generating textures from polygon meshes and 2D sources such as photographs and heightmaps. Its Baker creates textures from high-to-low polygon meshes, while Color To Normals turns images or heightmaps into normal maps for processing in the Integrator. Documented outputs include normal, derivative, displacement or height, ambient occlusion, transmission, concavity, and convexity maps. Knald supports texture baking and physically based rendering workflows. Processing uses single- and double-precision floating point and handles 8-, 16-, and 32-bit image data. The company describes it as suitable for physically based pipelines in interactive work, visual arts, and product design. A supported OpenCL-compatible GPU is required. Listed compatibility is limited to 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. The 30-day demo costs nothing (30-day demo). The Freelancer License costs $100 as a one-time purchase; it covers qualifying individuals or businesses with no more than one director, officer, manager, member, or employee, and permits installation on up to two devices owned by the licensee. The Studio License costs $200 as a one-time purchase.