After looking around on youtube, I couldn't find a video that was good enough (to me) to demonstrate NDO's tremendous speed and quality. The point for me was to show how a person could make hard-surface normals so fast without taking any measurements and just using shapes and snapping tools. Super awesome when tracing UV's for a giant mech or a space station! So I made my own video. I was going to keep it in real time, but it was approximately 35 minutes and extremely boring to watch. I multiplied the speed by 4 and added some drum music (lol). I think it's still slow enough to give you a good look at the tools and workflow of NDO in Photoshop. I put the link at the bottom.
This is something Substance Designer should have (in my extremely humble opinion!). SD's vector graphic node would be a perfect place for tools like this. I absolutely love SD, more than any other program I have. But my quality workflow demands that I fall back on a little photoshop plug-in that does something so much better.
NDO's hard-surface normal maps are sharper than any Zbrush/mudbox bake no matter the resolution. They're sharper than anything you can achieve in SD, using imported masks or the SVG draw tool. I've tried it for days and weeks, just trying to even get close. Take this as a challenge if you think you can do it!! (and if you do achieve this in a similar timely fashion, please oh please tell me how!). The main problem is controlling edge shape and depth, ON THE FLY. Try it with every node in the program and see what I mean.
This is not a big deal. I will continue to use NDO to make awesome normals. But I will always wish that SD (the King!) had something this fast, easy, and just plain 'badass' built into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U13g7MwkAo