Knald vs Trumble

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.

Trumble is a browser-based creative suite for game developers and artists working on texturing and painting. Its Texture tool paints PBR textures directly onto meshes in a 3D viewport, while Paint handles 2D work on alphas, masks and channels. Bake generates normals, ambient occlusion, curvature and other maps in the browser without an offline renderer. Texture packs can be exported for Unreal, Unity, Godot and Roblox. The Texture tool accepts OBJ, STL, FBX, glTF and GLB files, and meshes need proper UVs to be paintable. The suite includes hundreds of materials and textures, and can connect to Google Drive to autosave projects there rather than using Trumble account storage. It runs in modern browsers on Windows, macOS and Linux; no account is needed to get started. The product is in early access and receives regular improvements. Free includes current tools with workspace ads; paid plans start at $5/mo, with higher tiers adding options such as no ads and early access.