Flatiron is an interesting MaxScript plugin that puts full scene texture-baking support right into the interface, offering unwrapping, baking, logical seam generation, and packing in sensible and machine efficient ways.  The newest verion, 1.6, even adds automatic self-illumination for immediate viewport previews.

In the newest version, the development team of Flatiron concentrates on delivering the ultimate tool for on the growing market of mobile console devices such as Nintendo DS, Wii and IPad and browser games: artists and developers working on these platforms have an urgent need for minimal memory requirements and small, yet good looking textures for their games.

Looks like an impressive product if you do a lot of texture making, and they have a time/size limited free trial available for download.  Full version is 299 € . Full details after the break.

Flatiron.

Flatiron version 1.60 released
http://www.texturebaking.com

Flatiron is a unique render-to-texture plug-in for Autodesk 3dsMax, capable of baking full scenes or selections of objects into a single UV map. Game developers, architects and CG visualisation aritsts are able to generate any kind of baked maps of their scenes and levels with just a few clicks, containing clusters of objects or even whole sceneries.

It is a fast, simple and yet configurable automatic unwrapping and baking solution that greatly speeds up the process of baking complex scenes. As the only tool on the market that can automatically generate logical UV seams on the objects and optimaly pack multiple objects in mashinable way in any desirable count of UV sheets.

In the newest version, the development team of Flatiron concentrates on delivering the ultimate tool for on the growing market of mobile console devices such as Nintendo DS, Wii and IPad and browser games: artists and developers working on these platforms have an urgent need for minimal memory requirements and small, yet good looking textures for their games.

This latest version of Flatiron 1.6 contains the most often requested features: additional unwrap options for hard surface objects, automatic self-illumination setting for immediate viewport previews and direct access to the render element settings through MAXScript.

* added additional unwrapping mode for hard surface object which produced suboptimal results with the default organic unwrapping mode
* added option to automatically adjust self-illumination of baked materials
* added option to force the baker to use the 3ds Max default material independently from the scene source materials
* added MAXScript access for the bake element parameters
* fixed distortions when rendering multiple maps where the unwrap had a different aspect ratio than the rendered textures
* fixed sub-materials getting mixed up in Multi/Sub-Object materials when the ‘Clean Multimaterial’ option was used
* fixed issues with grouped objects only being partially included when baking selection sets
* fixed texture corruption for certain render options when the currently selected layer was hidden during rendering
* in addition this release contains various minor fixes and performance improvements

About 3d-io

3d-io games & video production GmbH is specialized company for high-end software development, modeling, animation, rendering, CG effects and 3D industrial design. 3d-io GmbH, headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany, has an established strong presence in game development, design & video production, digital content creation as well as in graphics and animation. We are dedicated to provide easy-to-use software products accompanied by dedicated support team, experienced programmers and top notch 3D artists.