Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Frozen Flame cuts price of MindTex to just $15

Frozen Flame has cut the price of MindTex, its normal map generation tool, to just $14.95.

MindTex takes an existing diffuse, normal or height map and generates other map types from it, including normal, height, specular, self-illumination and ambient occlusion.

Judging by the video above, the software has a reasonable range of tools for tine-tuning the output, plus a 3D preview of the results with customisable lighting parameters.

Output is similarly customisable, with options to bake map types together on export, or to save a greyscale map in the alpha channel of an RGB map.

There is also a batch processing toolset for large jobs, accessible via the GUI or command line.

Options for indie game artists
If this all sounds familiar, it probably is. Last month, we covered Rendering Systems’ ShaderMap 2: at $39.95, a similarly inexpensive map conversion tool.

Throw in SMAK 2.0, Jorge Rodriguez’s recently open-sourced normal map baking tool, and indie artists now have an unprecedented range of options for map generation work, along with established – but higher-priced – alternatives such as CrazyBump and Bitmap2Material.

MindTex is available now, for Windows XP and above.

Read more about MindTex on the Frozen Flame website