Earlier by releasing 3DsMax 2011 Autodesk presented a new way to create realistic materials in 3DsMax called “Substance”. Substance it’s a new texturing format loaded in a small files containing multi-output maps such as Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Bump, etc. Allegorithmic created a new material into 3DsMax taking advantage of substance called Bitmap2Material. Bitmap2Material is an incredibly powerful filter that can help you generate seamlessly tiling materials from any bitmap image directly in all compatible solutions.
In real world it works as follows; take any picture, photo or texture and feed Bitmap2Material with it, the rest will do Bitmap2Material generating normal map, height map, ambient occlusion and specular map. It’s really impressive and the tool is also featuring some settings for tweaking your final result.
Features:
· Transform any photo into a seamless tiling material
· Generate multiple texture maps at once: diffuse, normal, specular, height and ambient occlusion
· Fine tune all resulting maps
· Randomize the results to get infinite variations from a single source
· ...
Source and full article: Allegorithmic