New Ultimapper Options in Softimage 2010

Softimage 2010 has new Ultimapper options: now supporting the creation of bent normal maps, plus the full arrange of Ambient Occlusion shader options.

I did a quick test to see the differences between the available settings. The above image shows the resultant maps from the 4 combinations of options and on the image below how they look applied to the low resolution object in Open GL preview.

 

In this case, bent normals seem a lot smoother while the binormals map seems to result in a closer approximation from hi to low res sources in this case. The drawback with bent normals is they render twice as slow. However, I'm pretty sure that there is a case for each of these solutions out there.