Crazybump

[CapperMxFreak]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum!

But I have found a program to create, normal, displacement, occlusion and specularity maps.

it's really an easy program to use, and I think it would be good for beginners.

Nvidia Photoshop plugin is probably better but also harder to use, I think.

It's called CrazyBump and the demo can be downloaded free here: http://www.crazybump.com/

you only have the free demo in 30 days (i think). There is a Tutorial in the link ^^

but thats it good luck

[totorox]

There's a free tool, including commercial, beta for now, but powerfull called 'Xnormal', with photoshop plugin too :
http://www.xnormal.net/

xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps. It can also project the texture of the highpoly model into the lowpoly mesh ( complete texture transfer, even with different topologies ).

Includes too an interactive 3D viewer with multiple mesh and textures format support, shaders and realtime soft shadows / glow effect.

It comes with some useful tools like height map - normal map - cavity map - occlusion - tangent/object space and spherical harmonics tools.

All these computations are done using multicore/multithreading, distributed/parallel rendering, ray tracing and advanced GPGPU techniques.