wow, its up to 300? thats insane..... i guess all the popularity went to their head because no image based normal mapping program is worth that...

I brought a copy of Shadermap Pro yesterday for only $20, money well spent I think, very happy.

Have played around with Crazybump before, but yeah the $300 price tag is unreasonable for what you get compared to Shadermap Pro.

Love the batch generate option in Shadermap Pro and all the maps looked really impressive when I brought the generated maps into gamestudio. The downside is the program is a little less customizable when compared to crazybump, but the latest update has offered more customization and the next few updates they've been talking about on the forum sounds like the customization will be on par with crazybump soon.

Overall I think it's a handy tool for us indies wanting to save time and lots of money to get our games to look a little more next generation

Read their forum, you can use the 100$ version commercially as well... if you're an indie developer, or a small team.

Yes. I already read about that. But a license is more safe. You can only rely on their forum then and if they sue you then they are right because of the personal license applying to you.

They should rather offer an indie license like we do at Dexsoft.

You might be right, but i think its more about trust... how can they prove that the maps are done with their software?

even $100 is too much for just generating and tweaking normal maps, if you ask me.

It depends on what do you do with the program, how often you use it and how much time it saves you... and everyone's time costs more than a 100$, on the other hand, if you find a cheaper alternative... well, that's great

btw, i need a program that calculates normal maps from high poly to lowpoly models. so far i tried

xNormal (favourite, but fails sometimes in calculating the height maps and all nm's are looking flat)
nvidia MeLODy (totally unstable)
ATI GPUMeshMapper (see melody)

yeah, forgot that on the list, i tried this one as well, does not seem to have support for hard edges. so

ORB (all edges smoothed)
ATI NormalMapper (requires nmf models, thus requires max or maya)