Mental Ray - Shaders

[AdrianWilliams]

thx jeff! btw did you get my pm about the dirtmap tuts?:D

[JeffPatton]

No problem man, yeah I got the PM. I know I've posted this link in this thread before, but I be damned if I know which page it's on, so here it is again to save you some time.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ronchin.basket/umxprime/tutorials/AO/

If you have some free time, I would go through this thread page by page. A lot of usefull info here and I don't really want to start re-posting the same stuff twice.

I really need to compile all this info into a FAQ with tips & tutorials, but it will take a while (this thread is freakin' monsterous now)...I've put it off because a lot of the "newness" of MR has worn off and not as many people need this info now as they once did.

Jeff

[AdrianWilliams]

jeff your a SUPERSTAR!!!!! big time bro all the work you have been doing with MR is just fantastic :bounce:
i dont know how to thx you again for your hard work:thumbsup:
do you have a site where i could view some of your work?

[JeffPatton]

Thanks man, I haven't made a "personal" section on my website yet. One of these days though.

[AdrianWilliams]

ahh shame that......please let me know when you do cause it would interesting to see :beer:......but is there nowhere apart from this thread where you have made stuff?

[JeffPatton]

Here's a WIP I'm working on now:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=144305
and an older one that I need to finish:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=83543&highlight=trans

Now, we return you to the MR shader thread...lol.

[AdrianWilliams]

naa not even close if i had to say...it would be between MR and brazil:bounce:

[deetee]

For what im making I would hold a button on VRay render. Basically the best render is the render you know the best.

[ToddD]

Guys, comparing renderers is only going to convolute this thread. I think we should try to stick to the subject, as future members looking for info will have less OT info to sort through. :thumbsup:

[JeffPatton]

AMEN...there's already too many pointless "which renderer is best" threads. Please don't bring that here.

Jeff

[JeffPatton]

After looking at the last couple of pages, not many "goodies" have been posted here in quite a while. I suppose the "newness" of Mental Ray has worn off. I also admit that I don't use Mental Ray anymore myself since I found out that it doesn't work with many of my plug-ins (afterburn, dreamscape & RPC mainly). Maybe you guys have abandoned ship as well. Well, for the ones that still use it, here's another goodie!

I was trying to re-create a scene that is located in the version6features folder of Max6 (called causticsteapot01.jpg). I thought it may be usefull to others since I still get regular emails asking for help with caustics.

Anywho, heres the render:

http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/C-photons.jpg

and here's the scene:
Download scene (http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/C-photons.zip)

Render time: 0:01:25 on a dual Xeon 3.2 system

Please don't email me asking for the .HDR that I used in this scene. I've already posted it on page 1 of this thread. Plus I only used it for reflections, not lighting. So you can also just replace it with one you have already.

Jeff

[hjalle]

The link goes to the same image.:shrug:

[JeffPatton]

D'OH.....fixed now. Sorry. :blush:

[hjalle]

A question about alpha.
I have a lot of problem with composite when i use mental ray.
I get a white edge, I often go back to scanline to create alpha.
?????????????

And thin renderable nurb lines/lines looks like .....shit

why:bounce:

[mickatt]

Hi everybody

there are some news about SSS shader

someone know that :

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=11782;start=0

and the maya version

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=144747&perpage=15&pagenumber=2

I try to do the same things in 3dsmax (I see the shader in the material browser)

But for the moment I don't have any result
If anyone have some info please ...

sorry for my english

[Pixero]

Has anyone got the new SSS shader to work?
It keeps crashing Max for me.

[JeffPatton]

I've modified the diffusion.mi file in an attempt to make it work, but it still crashes when you change either the direct or indirect amounts...but now you can modify the colors, etc...but it still renders black.

I will attach the file incase anyone has ideas on how to fix it:

[Pixero]

Same here. It crashes the moment I touch indirect or direct amounts.

First I thought it might be using some new functions from MR 3.3 in XSI 4 and Maya 6, but I tried it in Maya 5 (MR v 3.2) and it works fine so it should work with Max as well. Its still in beta so there is still hope.

How does the light linking work in Max?
The light array control in the mi file states hidden and non connectable.
In Maya you have to link the scene lights in the shader for it to show in render. Might be why it renders black in Max.

[AdrianWilliams]

could any one upload a scene file so i could give it a try?

[zomboxy]

Pixero,

There is an exclude/include function for each light. It's in the shadow section of the the"General Parameters" rollout. That is the only thing I've found that would be similar to "light linking" in Maya.

Zom.

[Pixero]

Thanks zomboxy, but I wonder if that really would effect the MR shader?

[Pixero]

Found out how the light linking in the Diffusion MR shader worked.
Just press add and click on the lights in the viewport. :blush:
Havent been able to get Diffusion to render properly though. :sad:

[ILS]

wow that was educational.

but i still have trouble making the SSS work in my own scenes.
i'm trying to emulate a camera lens material. but all at best is a fuzzy white surface or a dotted one or just black. i also can't seem to get the HDRi to reflect in the lens.

http://lyonswolivar.com/pix/lens.jpg

here is the reference image i'm using.

the problem is, is tha the glass itself is perfectly transparent and clear, it is the specular that gives that colour effect.

[zomboxy]

I was just wondering if this should all be done over at Discreet. Aren't they responsible for seeing that MR is actually usable? Yes, some of what is available is quite good but isn't it incomplete? It seems that we are all working quite hard to get MR shaders to work with MAX. Is someone at Discreet supposed to be doing this for us? Does anyone know if or when they plan to make MR more functional? Am I wrong in assuming that the next update will have all of this corrected? Anyone?

Zom

[JeffPatton]

ILS - why worry about SSS for that lens? It's a specular effect just as you said. So make a clear raytrace material and use a gradient in the specular channel.

Here's a quick test example i threw together and the scene:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/C-lens.jpg
and the scene:Download (http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/C-lens.zip)

-----------------------------------------------

Zomboxy - "Is someone at Discreet supposed to be doing this for us?" .......your kidding right? When you open the material editor in Max, your faced with a bunch of grey, empty materials. Discreet gives you an empty palette and it's up to you to create what you need to work with. Now, they did supply the architectural materials, but I think even those came from VIZ or lightscape.

I think we've done a good job at "demystifying" the shader creation for Mental Ray here and even supplied a fairly extensive .mat to back that up. I would think it to be a waste of time to duplicate this thread elsewhere.

I'm fairly confident that Discreet is working on something that will better explain the creation of mental ray shaders. So maybe in the next version you will have an official instruction book.

Until then, experiment. If your under a deadline, post questions here or at the Discreet board (or both)....hopefully you will get the answers to your questions.

Jeff

[zomboxy]

No Jeff, I'm not kidding. There were a number of shaders that shipped with MR for max that were hidden. We unhid them to find that most of them don't really work. There are scaling problems or other problems that prevent them from rendering properly or even rendering at all. Discreet included them on purpose I think. Hopefully, with plans to include them as working unhidden shaders. Are they planning to fix them and include working versions in the next update? Am I expecting too much in wanting MR to be fully usable so soon? It seems to take a very long time to (not all of the time) have a useless or almost useless result in some instances. There is a lot of time wasted don't you think? Experimenting is not wasted time but dead ends are.

Z

[ILS]

thanks for the quick reply.

but i'm still a little confused.

if the IOR of glass ranges from 1.5 to 1.7. how come you set yours to 1.1

i was actully using a set of lenses modeled after a real camera set up and this is why i was trying to use the mental ray glass (lume) material. here are some results i got that were not very satisfactory. http://www.angelfire.com/ak5/ils/Camera_lens.htm

i can mail you a working file so you can have a closer look.

[JeffPatton]

ILS - I wasnt sure what IOR to put for the rounded lens. I wasn't overly concerned with the IOR or shapes, just mainly the "look". By all means if your going for accuracy then use the correct IOR for that lens.

Bottom line, I felt the IOR of 1.1 was a close match to the picture you included...even though you are correct, that's not in the correct range.

Instead of using the glass lume, why not just use the raytrace material I used and increase the IOR to suit your needs?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zom,
I get the feeling that MR was pushed in and Discreet didn't have time to make all shaders work properly before the release date. Thats why several were hidden.

I thought the scaling problems were solved by using real world measuring units? Correct me if I'm wrong with that statement. I'm not 100% sure about that one.

I don't think your asking too much at all to want all the shaders to work as they are suppose to. I have no idea if Discreet is working on the compatiblity issues or not. I would sincerely hope so. It would've been huge to have the hair shader working with this release.

I used MR for quite a while until I found out that it didn't work with Afterburn or Dreamscape, etc....then I quickly stopped using it. However I don't think thats a Discreet issue, moreso a Mental Ray issue. I'm not sure if those plugins work with the stand alone version of MR or not.

I agree with you that it just depends on what your rendering as to the usefulness of "our version" of mental ray. I apparently misunderstood what you were saying originally.

Jeff

[dissidently]

Jeff, having read your post about Mental Ray not working with afterburn, dreamscape etc.... which renderer are you using most of the time now and why that one?

[Trolldeg]

I've been experementing with the mr_subscatter shader and multi-pass renderings, since the mr_subscatter shader takes up the diffuse slot and thus prevents the use of textures :

http://www.kompakt.se/upload/translucency-test.jpg

http://www.kompakt.se/upload/head.jpg

here is the PSD for the last pic, if you want to see the layers separately: headcomp.psd (http://www.kompakt.se/upload/headcomp.psd)

[Iain McFadzen]

Originally posted by Trolldeg
I've been experementing with the mr_subscatter shader and multi-pass renderings, since the mr_subscatter shader takes up the diffuse slot and thus prevents the use of textures :


No it doesn't, you can use textures with mr_subscatter.

You have to use either a 'Shader List (texture)' MR shader in the Surface slot (allows you to stack multiple shaders in various combinations), or use a Shellac material, with your texture-mapped Standard Material in the Base slot, and an empty material with mr_subscatter in the Surface channel in the 'Shellac' slot.

The render results are exactly the same whichever way you do it, though taking the Shellac route will allow you to use the Shellac Amount spinner to control the strength of the SSS effect.

BTW, the shader only works correctly when using photometric lights, not standard lights. You can see the effect using standard lights of course, but it's not physically accurate, the effect will look exactly the same regardless of the light's intensity.

[Iain McFadzen]

oops, butterfingers

double post, soz

[Trolldeg]

ok, the shader list i didn't know of, but I've tried the shellac method and it always seems the bitmap texture gets somewhat washed out if you want any SSS-effect to show.

[ILS]

i actually got a better result with the lens material.

http://www.angelfire.com/ak5/ils/Camera_lens.htm

[jdsb]

guys i really really need some urgent help here.iam using mental ray for rendering this piece of animation.
i keep getting these dark patches in the final render and the reflectino seems to move very fast across the watch surface as i rotate the camera or the object.
Please also download the animation to see what i mean if u can :cry:

right click save as (http://www.illusivepixels.com/JD/watch_pass1.mov)

i am using kitchen.hdr map for the reflections and the environment.
there is only one skylight in the scene using the environment map for illumination.


mental ray settings:


http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jsbhatti/checkplease.jpg
[IMG]http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jsbhatti/checkplease1.jpg/IMG]

please please help me....:cry: :cry: :cry:

[JeffPatton]

Hmmm, I wonder if using a stored photon map is causing that? I've never tried using that option on an animation. Did it calculate for just one frame or multiple frames (is multi-frame even possible with MR?)

Second, you say your using the environment map for illumination & reflections? Did you use two different HDR's? It's a good practice to use a small blurred copy of the hdr for lighting and the original copy for the reflections.

Maybe the minumum radius of the final gather was too large?

Jeff

[jdsb]

thx for the feedback jeff.
i am not sure if its calculating photon maps for each frame,the only thing its calculating before rendering each frame is the final gather points.
I am using the same kitchen.hdr map for reflections and illumination.I am going to try to use a small blurred version of the same map on the skylight parameters
Also going to try and change the minimum radius and see if it makes a difference.
thanks for your feedback.will post the render soon.
thanks again :)

[JeffPatton]

In thinking about it, the photon map is not doing anything in your scene. You said there's only a skylight for illumination? I don't think the skylight will cast GI photons with MR. Spotlight, MR area light, etc., will cast GI photons.

Sooo, that leaves us with the final gather settings as the suspect.

[jdsb]

i tried decreasing the minimum radius jeff,dodnt make a difference :cry: :cry: :cry: ,any other suggestions bro??
u might have noticed everything else works fine except for the black flickering thing on the screen,the animted screen is using opacity maps ,is there something i might need to disable (receive reflections etc ) in the object properties.?

[JeffPatton]

I hate to just throw darts at problems like this, but you may have a point with the opacity maps. The black spots do line up with the black lines on the dial.....maybe temporarily remove the dial maps all together and render a few frames to test?

[zomboxy]

I don't know if this is a part of the solution or not but, I have had something similar when rendering glass. I had to rebuild it a couple of times. I don't remember the specifics about it now.
Is there a front and a back surface to the glass or is it just one surface? Maybe it's the geometry and not the texture???

Zom

[chinamaxer]

quite good,but the render time is too long.......but better than brasil isn't it?haha

[ILS]

on maya's mental ray documentation i read that using stored photons is only good for animations where the object stands still and where the camera is moving. your problem might be that.

[shserge]

Hello, guys! Did anyone have the .mi file for Daniel Rind's diffuse shader for maya? Do you can show info how do you do the .mi file, i was told that it is necessary to put into it GUI of shader, how to do this?

[Pixero]

Here it is:

___________________________________________

#autor: lucefrancesca@hotmail.com
#name: Diffusion shader for mentalray by Daniel Rind

#:Modified for use in 3dsmax6 by Jeff Patton on 5/26/04

declare shader
color "Diffusion"
(
color "surface", #: default 0.9 0.8 0.7
color "absorption", #: default 0.6 0.2 0.1
scalar "diffuse", #: default 0.1 min 0.0 max 100.0
scalar "intensity", #: default 1.0 min 0.0 max 100.0
integer "samples", #: default 8 min 0 max 64
scalar "direct", #: default 0.5 min 0.0 max 1.0
scalar "indirect", #: default 0.5 min 0.0 max 1.0
boolean "textured_scatter",
color "scatter", #: default 1.0 1.0 1.0
boolean "use_irradiance",
color "radiance", #: default 0.7 0.7 0.7
integer "area_samples", #: default 0 min 0 max 256
color "illum", #: default 0.0 0.0 0.0
scalar "illum_amount", #: default 0.0 min 0.0 max 1.0
array light "lights"
)
version 1
apply material

gui "gui_Diffusion" {
control "Global" "Global" (
"uiName" "Diffusion",
"category" "Diffusion Shaders"
)

control "surface" "color" (
"uiName" "surface",
"value" 0.9 0.8 0.7
)
control "absorption" "color" (
"uiName" "absorption",
"value" 0.6 0.2 0.1
)
control "diffuse" "scalar" (
"uiName" "diffuse",
"value" 0.1,
"range" 0.0 100.0
)
control "intensity" "scalar" (
"uiName" "intensity",
"value" 1.0,
"range" 0.0 100.0
)
control "samples" "integer" (
"uiName" "samples",
"value" 8.0,
"range" 0.0 64.0
)
# control "direct" "scalar" (
# "uiName" "direct",
# "value" 0.5,
# "range" 0.0 1.0
# )
# control "indirect" "scalar" (
# "uiName" "indirect",
# "value" 0.5,
# "range" 0.0 1.0
# )
control "textured_scatter" "boolean" (
"uiName" "textured_scatter?"
)
control "scatter" "color" (
"uiName" "scatter",
"value" 1.0 1.0 1.0
)
control "use_irradiance" "boolean" (
"uiName" "use_irradiance?"
)
control "radiance" "color" (
"uiName" "radiance",
"value" 0.7 0.7 0.7
)
control "area_samples" "integer" (
"uiName" "area_samples",
"value" 0.0,
"range" 0.0 256.0
)
control "illum" "color" (
"uiName" "illum",
"value" 0.0 0.0 0.0
)
control "illum_amount" "scalar" (
"uiName" "illum_amount",
"value" 0.0,
"range" 0.0 1.0
)
control "lights" "array light" (
"uiName" "Lights",
# "hidden",
"nonConnectable"
)
}

end declare


____________________________________________

[shserge]

Thnx, Pixero!

[Pixero]

By the way, has anyone got it to work with Max?

[philipbruton]

hello pix

i haven't got this irritating shader to work,

with rgds to your added gui controls, what's this 4 ?

# control "direct" "scalar" (
# "uiName" "direct",
# "value" 0.5,
# "range" 0.0 1.0
# )
# control "indirect" "scalar" (
# "uiName" "indirect",
# "value" 0.5,
# "range" 0.0 1.0
# )


In all the shader declarations i've seen, i've never seen a control start with a #, does this affect the use at all ?
btw, gui controls shouldn't effect the use of this shader, as with other shaders, the addition of the apply statement from one 3d package to max, makes it useable.

This shader just doesn't work with max !

has anyone tried contacting the author to ask if he's got it to work, or if it's been tested with max at all ?

i'm gonna do this now, i'll let u know the out come, if in get a reply


phil b :wavey:

[zomboxy]

Phil,

From my old UNIX days "#" was placed at the beginning of a string in order to ignore it. I forget the actual name but I believe it stands for declare. Remove it and the string is included in the script.

Zom

[JeffPatton]

Originally posted by zomboxy
Phil,

Remove it and the string is included in the script.

Zom

And it will immediately crash. Which is why I ignored those strings until we can figure out how to make them work.

Jeff

[shserge]

Hello, Philip!
I asked author about porting his shader to max and he answered that he don't have max. Daniel also said that .dll files are the same for all mental ray implementations on Windows machines and it's need to adapt only declaration files.

[Pixero]

IT WORKS!!!

New version of Diffusion 1.0 here (http://animus.brinkster.net/stuff/plg_diffusion/plg_diffusion.html)

I´ve added the new parameters to the mi file.

Heres a direct link to the edited mi file: Diffusion.mi (http://w1.702.comhem.se/~u70208061/files/Diffusion.mi)

[loran]

there is no .mi files in the Diffusion.zip
could you be clear with installation or modification of files...
please... <:)
thx

[Pixero]

The mi file goes in: ...\3dsmax6\mentalray\include
the dll goes in: ...\3dsmax6\mentalray\shaders

Heres a direct link to the edited mi file: Diffusion.mi (http://w1.702.comhem.se/~u70208061/files/Diffusion.mi)

[JeffPatton]

Hey, cool...thanks for the update. Now this shader looks to be promising!

Test render:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-Shorse.jpg

Jeff

[BigRanS123]

Wow Jeff, that looks amazing!

I did have some questions, because I would love nothing more than to learn how to accomplish SSS like that!

All i could find in the zip file was a Diffusion_DLL but it is a CPP file!

Is this the one I should use, or is there some other file?

I don’t quite understand how to turn on, or access the feature in Max. I have tried to place a parti volume in the two volume shader slots, but to no avail... If this is the proper thing to do, and I just don’t have the setting properly set, could you post a screen of your settings?

Thank for everyone’s help, and I will continue to try different avenues!

Randall

[AdrianWilliams]

hay what other files do i need apart from the diffusion.mi to get this to work?

also doesnt the update for MR have the sss in it?

[JeffPatton]

You need the diffusion.mi file that pixero posted above, and you need the diffusion.dll out of the diffusion.zip. When you unzip the diffusion.zip file you will have several folders. Diffusion.dll is located under Diffusion>nt-x86>package.

Again, all you need is the .mi file and .dll file....don't worry about the other files.

The seahorse I posted above is basically the default settings of the shader! And it renders quickly! Just stay away from the "use_irradiance" checkbox or else it will crash.

I don't know of any updates for MR (within 3dsmax6)...did I miss something?

Jeff

[BigRanS123]

I got it working, Thanks.

I just need to play with some of the settings to get a good looking render!

Does anyone know how to get the SKY light to work with it?

[JeffPatton]

I don't think skylight works with it (atleast in my tests it didn't). But, you can render an AOCC pass (dirtmap) and then add the "GI" look in photoshop.

[philipbruton]

hello

nice work peeps, cheers

Phil b

:bounce:

[geoMan]

here's how i got Herman scene....

http://kurupt.xapss.com/caustic%20teapot/caustic%20finalFGlarge.jpg

with GI
http://kurupt.xapss.com/caustic%20teapot/gicausticlarge.jpg

[AdrianWilliams]

thx jeff
also i read in this months 3d world magazine that mentalray 3.2 has an up date to 3.3

[Pixero]

MentalRay 3.3 is for Maya 6 and XSI 4. Dont know if theres an update for Max.

[Hmura]

Hi guys, awesome thread btw. :thumbsup:

Just a question Jeff. I'm having problems with the Diffusion shader. When I select it in the material editor I just get a black circle, which cannot be assigned to objects. How did you get it to work? Am I missing something or do I need to activate sumthing in max. Thanks in advance.

:shrug:

[JeffPatton]

Hey, I just posted a sample scene over at Evermotion. Here's the link:
http://www.evermotion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2040

Hope that helps. :)

Jeff

[Hmura]

Thanks for the scene m8.

Sorry to be a pain, But I still can't see the shaders in the material editor. Its just a black circle.

Also, when I try to render your scene it says that there is no Diffuse shader. I can't figure it out, I have placed the .mi and .dll files in the right folders.

:surprised

[Trolldeg]

in what way is the diffusion shader better than mr_subscatter? in the limited tests I've made the diffusion shader renders slower.

[ToddD]

Hey Jeff! I've been playing around with the diffusion sample as well, any way to get a slight shine to it? I tried several things:
Specularity, didn't see a noticable difference.
Tried mixing this material with another glossy glass material, didn't work either.
Well, at least I can play around with this stuff now, I am up and running, damn FAST!

Todd

[JeffPatton]

Todd, glad your back up and running on the new PC!

Yeah getting a specular to work with the diffusion shader was a hoot. I think I have a solution though (you were on the right track with a blend material).

I also didn't have any luck until I blended one of those damn "hidden" shaders that I unlocked a while back. Anywho, I blended the diffusion shader with an Illum.Phong (base) shader and here's the result:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/diffusion2.jpg

Edit: The architectural material blends well too.

Hmura - Did you get that issue worked out? You do have the mental ray extensions enabled right? I mean if you render something with mental ray and a regular material it works right?

Trolldeg - In my tests the Diffusion shader is FAST...A LOT faster than any of the other SSS shaders I've tried. The image above rendered in 32 seconds (thats freakin fast for SSS of that quality IMHO)

Jeff

[NBF]

Is it also posiable to use Daniel Rind's Diffraction
Shader in Max?

[treed]

Hmm is this really wierd. I installed the diffusion shader and I make a teapot and add a spot light. Then right when I adjust any of the parameters, max crashes. Anyone ever encounter this?

[herbert west]

http://www.mediasprout.com/misc/cheddar_diffusion.jpg

Previous "cheddar" scene rendered with the diffusion shader. I think my original looked a bit better (as far as scattering, the diffusion shader is too even). But, hey, for quick and dirty SSS with no caustic generation, this kicks @$$. Why the heck can't the wizards at Mental Images or Discreet give us this kind of stuff right out of the box? When I plopped down $3K plus for Max 6 I expected a little more in the shading department, not "look for the hidden features".

[JeffPatton]

Originally posted by treed
Hmm is this really wierd. I installed the diffusion shader and I make a teapot and add a spot light. Then right when I adjust any of the parameters, max crashes. Anyone ever encounter this?

Yes, make sure your using the correct .mi file (posted a page or two back). The default .mi file that comes with the .zip won't work with 3dsmax. And even with the correct .mi file, stay away from the "use irradiance" settings....instant crash.

Jeff

[treed]

Ok here's my test using the diffusion shader. This was originally a Brazil SSS test but I wanted to see how this shader worked. I still have lots of tweaking but you get the idea. I need to get the deep scattering to look more deep. On the opposite side of the dragon, I need to get rid of more of the black areas and make them more translucent.

Diffusion dragon (http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php?act=view&file=ZGlmZnVzaW9uIGRyYWdvbi5qcGc=)


Ohh and btw, stay away from the texture scatter option and scatter color, max will crash instantly.

[treed]

Ok guys, heres another shot at using Diffusion. Now I got the surface looking overall way better but the SSS is still weak.


Diffusion dragon1 (http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php?act=view&file=ZGlmZnVzaW9uIGRyYWdvbjEuanBn)

[treed]

Ok just got done rendering this. I'm much happier the way the SSS came out.

Render time was 1 hour 11 min. I also had GI turned on and 1 min, 4 max samples.


Diffusion dragon2 (http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php?act=view&file=ZGlmZnVzaW9uIGRyYWdvbjIuanBn)

[JeffPatton]

I rendered out a short SSS animation and converted it to flash. Here's the link:
SSS Demo animation (http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/gallery/sss-test.htm)

Jeff

[D_WE]

Hi guys.. i am trying to do some ice materials in vray, but no luck.

so i decided to give mental ray a try. but i need some directions from u guys. this is what im trying to recreate..

Thanks..

[JeffPatton]

Here's my try. It's still a bit too transparant and waxy looking, but I thought it turned out kinda neat. I just posted it in the WIP section as I will keep working on this one (it's a keeper I think)

http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/iceberg.jpg

Jeff

[Hmura]

Well I finaly got it working :rolleyes:

This is just a test of a skin shader. I have combined it with BigRanS Skin Shader.

The top part of the head is hollow, thats why that area is more illuminated. The bottom jaw area is where the shader looks best.

Thanks guys, I will post more tests when I get more time.

http://www.hostaccess2.com/~ararat/Diff3.jpg

[D_WE]

that looks realy nice:thumbsup: . how long took it to render? and can u post a screenshot of the material tree? :)


/D

[treed]

Hmura, I can't see didily squat. Try and re post the image.

[ILS]

.


i think the material is almost spot on - the modeling makes it look a bit unreal.

it almost looks like there is a a copy of the iceberg inside the bigger one.

[JeffPatton]

Here's the update:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/iceberg3.jpg

Render times: This last one took a shade over 13 minutes (dual Xeon 3.2 system). The first iceberg render took about 7 minutes. The second version took longer because I used MR displacement.

There's no GI in either scene, only a single spotlight. To help get some definition, I rendered a separate pass using the dirtmap shader on this last render.

Anywho, I'll post a simple scene using both materials later today so you guys can improve on it.


Jeff

[Hmura]

Heres the same one with a bit of editing

http://www.hostaccess2.com/~ararat/Diff3_edit.jpg

[Hmura]

Hey Jeff, Very nice shader!! But I think you should model the ice a bit sharper. Just a thought.

[treed]

Wow Jeff, thats just Wow, lol.


Hmura, thats fantastic! What kind of lighting setup do you have going on there?

[jared g]

ok, I am still quite a newbe to this all. I have Max5 and Brazil and was wondering how to use the shaders in this thread? Isnt Mental Ray a plugin supplied with max 5?

[JeffPatton]

Allllrooty, here's the files:

Ice-1 render:
http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/store/Ice-1.jpg
Scene:
Ice-1 Scene (http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php?act=dl&file=aWNlLTEuemlw)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's the displacement version:
Ice-2 render:
http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/store/Ice-2.jpg
Scene:
Ice-2 Scene (http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php?act=view&file=aWNlLTIuemlw)

jared g - For the most part, the shaders in this thread are for Mental Ray, which was included with 3dsmax6. So most are not compatible with Brazil or Scanline. However as you know Brazil is very capable of creating the same effects or better with the wax and skin materials.

Jeff

[D_WE]

Thanks jeff.. :thumbsup: For your kindness, Awsome pics of icebergs.

I will post some pics tomorrow so u can se the result.

/D

[D_WE]

hm.. problems..:hmm: . i downloaded the diffusion shader. but it wont work with your scene jeff? all i get is :
PHEN 0.2 error 051011: shader "Diffusion" not found

Can u please tell me whats wrong? :blush:


/D

[JeffPatton]

Make sure your using the correct .mi file. (the one that was posted two or so pages back). Also ensure that both the .dll and .mi files are in the proper folders and MR is selected as the renderer.

Jeff

[loran]

thx jeff
great shader settings! incredibly speed!!

thx for the ocean setting that looks really interesting

and thx for sharing your scenes


:bowdown:

[ILS]

wow, not to discredit all the work on the diffusion shader but the ocean material is amazing. thanks.


i wonder if you can use diffuse to simulate dust and clouds without having to use particles.

[akropol2000]

i'm kinda new to MR ...
but thanx to you guys i know a lot of things now .... basically i've been following this forum for days ... and went through all materials and followed all tips ...

everything has been amazing that far ... the whole learning expirience is making me very excited ...

so thank you guys for doing what you doing ...

OK

now that I got that out of the way ...

here is my small question .... after i opened ice 1 and ice 2 scenes i have this message :

missing dll:
mentalray.dlz class diffusion ...

i know I have it ...

i've been doing some research about that some ppl saying it's because NVIDIA desktop .... I disabled it and the problem is not going away ...

I would greatly appreciate if somebody could explain to me what is wrong ...

thanks

[zomboxy]

Akropol2000,

Have you installed the Diffusion shader and is it installed properly? the .dll file goes into the ... /mental ray/shaders dir, and the .mi file goes into the .../mental ray/include dir. Make sure that the .mi file comes from the post by Jeff a few pages back...
If that is all done properly it should work fine. If it isn't working then I'm not sure why....

Zom

Ps: I am running an NVIDIA card and have not experienced any problem that would prevent MR from loading a shader...I have other things but not that.

[akropol2000]

thank you so much zomboxy!!!


it did help ... now the ice scenes opens without any problems ...

but i have a new problem :)

i receive simillar missing .dll window for dirtmap ... when i open the schene with greebled sphere ...

where can i get fix for that ....


thanx

[zomboxy]

akropol2000,

Go back about 60 or 70 pages and find the part of this thread that has the "Dirtmap" tests, instructions etc. The same method applies there.

Zom

[ILS]

i'm having a bit of trouble with the diffusion shader.

when i try to use it on a simple sphere it renders the surface faceted even though faceted is not turned on.

[JeffPatton]

Increase the samples.

[zomboxy]

akropol2000,

Go back about 60 or 70 pages and find the part of this thread that has the "Dirtmap" tests, instructions etc. The same method applies there.

Zom

[zomboxy]

akropol2000,

Go back about 60 or 70 pages and find the part of this thread that has the "Dirtmap" tests, instructions etc. The same method applies there.

Zom

[ILS]

actually increasing samples doesn't help - what did help though is unlocking the shadow beneath the surface map in the MR connection.

[akropol2000]

thanx for help again ... everything works !!!

can anyone explain to me the principles of dirtmap ... what effect does it produce and how it achieves it ...

i'm trying to recreate the scene with teapots ... but after i applied the dirtmap material I can't seem to see any differences .... I'm just trying to see how can I benefit form this material ...

thanks

[ILS]

ambeint occultion is the only practical use i found for it but i'm sure there are tons more .

AO (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ronchin.basket/umxprime/tutorials/AO/)

[Mhyrdin]

:eek:
What a topic, 70 pages to read !
I'm training with Mental in 3dsMax6 (I work sometimes with Maya too)
and all these pages are very usefull
Thank's all :thumbsup:
If i get some interesting tries, I will post them ...:blush:

[akropol2000]

I'm trying to understand how scene Light -me test.max scene works...
I figured out that you have a glare effect. I also figured out that you have some sort of 2 layer (windows-openings) but i don't understand how do thei work...

Could you please explain in more detail the creation of lighting in that scene.

I have very similar project and i would really like to have that look ...
But I can't recreate that scene on my own ... for some bizzare reasons :)

thank you

[JeffPatton]

akropol2000 - The layer that was hidden is just the window glaze layer. It's a standard procedure to hide the glass and then run the photo calculation and save that calculation file. Then you can unhide the glass and render the scene using the stored calculation. This is done to save a little on render times and ensure that all the photons make it into the room. If the glass was in place during the initial photon calculation, it may take longer to process that photon solution, and some of the photons may bounce off the exterior part of the glass.

The actual lighting is pretty basic. One direct light for the sun and a skylight to enable GI. The glare shader does all the calculations for the actual glare.

Jeff

[akropol2000]

Well let me tell you my problem then, Jeff

I tried to recreate that scene and it didn't work ... exactly same light same settings ... just different model ... same scale model !!!

when i'm trying to render it gives me that error 361053 : no photons stored after emitting 1000000 photons (canceling emission)...

I've tried to put my model inside your scene ... and it works wonderfully , but the moment i'm deleting or hiding your layers it gives me the same error !!!

I know it something very simple but i can't get it ... :(

What's really frustrating is that as soon as i turn back your layer 0 with windows/openings with inverted normals evrything starts workinmg again !!!

thats the reason i asked about them before ... it seems like there is something about them ....

Could you please describe step by step how you did lighting in that scene (light me test ).

I'm stuck here ... just can't understand what is going on in that scene....
I've tried to recreate it many times .... everything is absolutely identical ... just doesn't work .... :(

may be you know a link to a tutorial that would help me understand the interior lighting a little better... but i've been on this forum and other forums reading everything about MR and interior exterior lighting .... went through dozens of techniques ... but for my particular project the look that you scene have is PERFECT !!!

anyway ... i would greatly appriciate if you'd find some time to help me ...

Thank you

Editing:
I just found outy what was my problem ... and i hope i.m correct ... the error message was because i didn't have a light bouncer under my scene ...

and second problem what i had was thet the interiors of my scene was to dark ... I used your technique with openings layer , I also increased the energy level ... now my interior looking good ... although exterior looks to bright now ... don't know how to fix it yet... :(

but no more error ...

i don't know if that is correct or not ...
please advise

thanks again

[rlph.]

Does anyone know where can I download the raytype shader that Philip Bruton meantions here:

http://support.discreet.com/webboard/wbpx.dll/read?147034,200
edit// duh, the link doesnt work becoz you have to log in...perhaps. here's copy/pasted reply:


"hello,

for mental ray shader slot, you dont need to use "material to shader", that is for a pre-biult shader..i.e the ones that ship with max (.mat)
The "dgs" (diffuse, glossy, specular) shader can be dropped right into this slot. If you need more control over your colour bleed, may i suggest this shader in the diffuse/ self illu/ shader diff, slots

http://www.pbstudios.co.uk/raytype.mi
http://www.pbstudios.co.uk/raytype.dll

Phil b"


the links he posted doesn't work and the shader sounds pretty usefull.


Ps.Big thanks to Jeff Patton for doing all this research!

[AdrianWilliams]

that link dont work:shrug:

[Trolldeg]

I take back what I wrote about the diffusion shader, this baby is fast! :)

[herbert west]

Really? It seems to me that the mr_diffuse shader is faster. The diffusion shader shows facets on the model, and seems slower to me. It also appears dark. The mr_diffuse shader seems to have better control over limiting the depth of the SSS effect. I'm sure these two shaders, while sharing the same theory, are written on different variations (I assume) of Henrik Wann Jensen's work. Both are awsome shaders (I wish I could write these darn things!), but so far mr_diffuse has given me better results (with skin, at least).

[Daniel-B]

Can someone post a screen cap of their Diffusion shader parameters. I just tried using SSS for the first time, and while I do get an SSS effect, I'm not sure how to control it.

I just want to use it for human skin. So if someone has the parameters for human skin, that would be great too.

[treed]

Here ya go PixelMagic. :)

http://www.queensoul.com/~tylerreed/diffusion%20settings1.jpg

[JeffPatton]

PixelMagic, about two pages back I also posted a couple of scenes using the diffusion shader. The combination of those scenes plus the documentation that comes with the shader that explains what each parameter does, should be more than adequate to get you going in right direction.

Good luck on creating the skin...and when you do, be sure to share your settings! :thumbsup:

@rlph - I don't know if this is the exact same shader but maybe it's worth a try?
http://www.impresszio.hu/szabolcs/MentalRay/RayType.htm

Jeff

[ToddD]

Hey Jeff, do you know if anyone has created a photon shader that will allow a self illuminated object to generate photons? I'm pretty sure maya and or xsi have something like this.....just wondering:D

[JeffPatton]

Fraid' not Todd....(atleast to the best of my knowledge)...would be very nice to have though.

Jeff

[actarus6]

could u help green lantern and so me too???:)

http://www.3dcenter.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=16995&st=0

I want to get the same results has he asks in the forum above

Could u share some settings or materials to get the same scene as the photos below

- Anisotropic for the brushed metal without bitmap is preferred because I have problem too to map my objects in scene

- and a glass like in the photos

I'm sure that for some of you this is a kid play to do a material as I ask for:thumbsup:
I never used this new version of Mental Ray for max but as I can see here it's great and maybe a lot faster than vray for those kind of scene
I have no idea how to get some render as the photo
I need a great help please reply to this message
:sad: Jeff patton please come down to the earth (u are a God of materials) and help a little human brain (mine)

thank u in advance

[JeffPatton]

actarus6 - Ok, I took a stab at the anistropic material and here's my result:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-anistropic.jpg

It uses a gradient ramp for the anistropic highlights (so no bitmap) and it's using the metal lume material. Now the render times weren't something to write home about, but you can reduce the samples on the metal lume materials to decrease the render times (but you'll get more grain)...also switching to a regular light instead of an area light like I used will decrease render times.

I can't include the HDR that I used, but it will reflect whatever you throw into the environment (something with lot's of blue looks nice). I also ran a dirtmap render after the original render to give some worn look to the chamfered areas (not required).

Anywho, here's the file if you guys want to improve upon it:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-anistropic.zip


Lastly...."Jeff patton please come down to the earth (u are a God of materials) and help a little human brain (mine)"....That made me laugh, your crazy man! :applause:

PS - I forgot about the glass. I'd just use either the glass(lume) or the architectural glass....maybe even a plain raytrace...should be fairly easy though.

[actarus6]

I made you laugh AND U MADE ME HAPPY with your help:thumbsup:


YOU could make me more happy with a glass :) Or better if u can explain simply how to work with material and Mental Ray Lume+ standard or what How do they work (Mental material)


What can I say

Thank u God of materials:)

Thank u very very much

[JeffPatton]

Ok, hold on and I'll see what I can churn out for the glass material

[actarus6]

Is it a your work the avatar below your name?

Is very very very funny

If yes how many render engines do u use?

Bye and thanks in advance
:)

[herbert west]

Here's what I've come up with for skin so far with the mr_subscatter shader. Works great with GI:

http://www.mediasprout.com/misc/skin1.jpg

http://www.mediasprout.com/misc/sss_shaders_test2.zip

[M-Saber]

Hey, Jeff ..

Thats Nice work u're doing here... i'll keep an eye on that thread for sure:scream:

[JeffPatton]

Ok, here's the glass & anistropic metal scene. Since I've already created a glass scene using the architectural glass, and some other glass mats in previous posts, I used the glass physics phen for this test. (you'll just have to dig for the other files, I don't remember what page they were on).

I did however include some of the other glass materials with this scene. The main difference is that the physics phen glass REQUIRES caustics to be enabled if you want a transparant shadow.

Anywho, here's the render:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-anistropic2.jpg

and here's the link to the scene:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-anistropic2.zip

Don't blame me for the nasty render times...LOL. You wanted a blurred metal material with anistropic highlights and a side order of accurate glass.....high render times come hand in hand with that my friend.

And yes I made that avatar from an Ornatrix test I was tinkering with. You can see a bigger view of it here:
http://www.ibmr.net/Ornatrix/index.php?dest=gallery

Later,

Jeff

[actarus6]

Tonight I'll pray u

(remdember?)
U are the god of materials:)

Thank u very much
but very very much

You are a God near Human being

You are very kindly person

Surely you know what help u gived to me

bye
from a Jeff Patton fan

[AdrianWilliams]

yah jeff i have to agree whith actarus6 you are a god

i would love for you to start a thread on making and testing brazil and vray materials and shaders :bounce:

[JeffPatton]

Now comon' guys, no comparisons to God's....seriously that's scary...lol. I'm just glad I can offer help to the community, and will continue to do so as long as I'm able. As far as a Brazil & Vray shader thread goes, there's Brazil materials in Visualboo's "free material library" thread here:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=18189

For Vray, I'm a mod over at Evermotion.org and can tell ya there's plenty of free Vray materials (140 thus far infact):
http://www.evermotion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1606
If you use Vray, Evermotion.org should be near the top of your bookmark list.

Jeff

[actarus6]

Yes you are right especially in this time (there's and there was wars for Gods I mean religious wars)

BUt it was ajoke

Anyway happy to know that some people do something for the pleasure to give an help to others!!

Thank u again Jeff

[AdrianWilliams]

coolio :bounce:

[rlph.]

@rlph - I don't know if this is the exact same shader but maybe it's worth a try?
http://www.impresszio.hu/szabolcs/MentalRay/RayType.htm

Jeff
yeah, that's the thing. By the way the links I posted work now...got it installed but haven't really used it yet...

[Radacci]

i think MR is realy stupid when it comes to radiosity....i have tried it out, and when i use MR-spotlight to illuminate a torus knot, and use realy low falloff field the radiosity is burning bright, if i set the falloff to 90+ it is barely visable, and if i use MR-omni it can't be seen at all.

And is it possible to get nice clean caustic effects, without upping photon count to the millions? seems kinda stupid to do caustic effects, when it looks so bad anyways, or when it takes a week to render it :)

[akropol2000]

Jeff it would be really nice if you could create different type of grass with Ornatrix ... I'm working on it right now ... but I can't get it to look anyhting near grass... I'm thinking of utilizing this plugin to create a large ammounts of grass for lanscape architecture ... etc. ...since it renders it fast ...

If you could help me with it ... that would be great and everybody would benefit ...

PS I'm sorry that I'm talking about it on this thread...

[philipbruton]

hello elmond,

seems u hate mental ray far too much but if you used it properly u'd learn to love it !

I would personal prefer to use the mental ray settings dialogue to set the light falloff using the inidvidual setting or the global light setting for the energy and falloff of the light. This way you have direct control over the phtons you r using in the scene. If you r using the falloff settings i'm sure it isn't affecting the photons in the same way as using the mental ray settings !

Good luck with it

Phil b

[Weider]

I have a small question not related to shader, but in the render dialogue, what is "Place Holders"? When the scene is too big I can't render my dirtmap scene (I got a message from MR: not enough memory, ... ) But sometimes, when I check it, it's really slower, but it works.

Do you know a trick for MR stop of closing (or crashing, as you want :) ) when it renders my scene? (I don't have a new computer, but still not bad: Athlon 1700+, Geforce 64megs and 1024megs RAM ddr)

anyway, thanks a lot for sharing guys! :thumbsup:

[matlock]

Weider, I'm not sure but try decrasing the maximum memory amount in the Rendering dialog. Also, maybe turn on the Conserve memory checkbox.

Hope it helps.

[philipbruton]

hello weider,

as matlock says, you should reduce the allocated memory to mentla ray.
place holders r used with the large bsp type and what they do is only load the geometry at the specific render time so as to swap memory and thus be more memory efficient ( preventing a crash )
The problem you may be having could alos lie in the images u r using a textures. Mental ray tends to convert all image types it doesn't support into raw image format and so it will consume a lot more memory. try converting all your texture images used in a scene to bmp and render again. This should help with the crash. also with the large bsp, set it to the lowest possible value for large scenes, this should increase the pre-rendering calcs, but decrease the render itself, good luck,

Phil b

[Weider]

thanks guys, I'll try your tips!

It's to render my dirtmap scene, with bump maps. All images are in .jpg except something: I have some foliage trees, so the opacity slot has a .tga texture in it. Maybe MR doesn't support well .tga?? Maybe I could save the opacity texture in .png or .gif and try again?

[Weider]

Oups, I check my scene and I don't have .TGA for the opacity of the tree. I have nothing there.

I tried to convert the tree in mesh but it always bugs. And it bugs often when it renders the tree (My scene is a castle with some trees to its left and right).

[philipbruton]

bmp format, BMP !!!!!!!

[psv]

hi all ,just a simple question for all of max6+mental ray users>

how it is working final gathering fallof ?
the only way of seeing some diferences in renderings was to use it with a skylight....otherwise no sign of fallof....

thx all.....

[jkillo]

I'm trying to create an organic leafy procedural material with mental-ray (for privet hedges, I'm trying to avoid modeling and texturing with bitmaps as it's killing my sub-par computer). After seeing the iceberg posted earlier with the use of 3d displacement I've attempted to create a foliage material, but so-far I have had unsatisfactory results, can anyone give me some tips please?

By the way this is the most educational thread I've read on anything CG related!
Although I've noticed that there is hardly any mention of the contour shader, how do you think it compares to max's ink and paint material?

[loran]

I'm curently trying to create a n ocean material using Ocean Lume , wich look so powerfull)...Thats works fine... until the animation render!!
when I render stills, animated displacement is ok( render at frame 1,15,45 are differents...)
but when i render animation, the displacement stay on the first frame!!
any idea to solve this?
thx

[JasonCamp]

i am new to mental ray and am learning it fast as i can, very fast thanks to the thread,

here is a quick test that i worked on ...its doing what i had wanted for the test except the white light at the top and bottom, once i moved the 2 planes though it almost went away , also its not inclosed in a fliped normal box , i did a render with final gather and it looked really nice .. i didnt save it though right now im rendering a "closed" neon sign and playin around with differnt textures , tring to get a glow on the glowing neon tubes lol.. i know i could do it with the light include / exclude and all that .. but if theres a way to do it in mental ray id rather stick with it , also im tring to unlock the mistery of the glare shader... wish i was at home so i could have my pc to work on while i rendered with my laptop but im stuck with this slow laptop ugh..

http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/store/mrbox.jpg
i have a huge wip but nothing to post on it i dont even want to think about rendering it in mental ray yet ugh. altho now i can knock out about 100,000 poly's that were hand carved in a tile road and just draw a nice mr displacement for it , wish i would have stumbled onto this fourm sooner, lmao http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon9.gif should increase my render time

[Gremlin]

actarus6 - Ok, I took a stab at the anistropic material and here's my result:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-anistropic.jpg

It uses a gradient ramp for the anistropic highlights (so no bitmap) and it's using the metal lume material. Now the render times weren't something to write home about, but you can reduce the samples on the metal lume materials to decrease the render times (but you'll get more grain)...also switching to a regular light instead of an area light like I used will decrease render times.

I can't include the HDR that I used, but it will reflect whatever you throw into the environment (something with lot's of blue looks nice). I also ran a dirtmap render after the original render to give some worn look to the chamfered areas (not required).

Anywho, here's the file if you guys want to improve upon it:
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mr-anistropic.zip


Lastly...."Jeff patton please come down to the earth (u are a God of materials) and help a little human brain (mine)"....That made me laugh, your crazy man! :applause:

PS - I forgot about the glass. I'd just use either the glass(lume) or the architectural glass....maybe even a plain raytrace...should be fairly easy though.I want that shader...for maya :) ...so how do I make it?
can anyone help me out??

[philipbruton]

Hello Gremlin


This shader has been created using a standard max anistropic shader, with the lume metal shader dropped in the diffuse slot and a reflection falloff of fresnel, with black for direct and the metal shader for the sides. Also a global enviroment map has been added to the scene for the reflection.
Surely you can recreate this in maya by wiring the lume shader to a standard anistropic shader with use of reflection falloff and an environmentla sphere !

Phil b

[JeffPatton]

loran check this thread:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=103521&highlight=ocean+lume
sounds like you may be using the ocean lume in a regular material? It won't animate unless it's in a MR material.

Gremlin: Sounds like philipbruton knows about Maya. I don't (haven't tried it), so I can't offer any ideas on how to create it in Maya (sorry).

[Ech0]

Firts off i want to say congrats on all the individuals who help put this thread together . I have been looking at this thread for a while now and just recently got a job doing exhibit designs and architecural rendering. And was wondering if you are able to use mr materials like the ocean lume material with like light tracer or radiosty or do we have to use mental ray . And if we do have to use mental ray do you guys know of any really good documentation on lighting in general i try to use mental ray and it always to dark (more like pitch black) i increase the photon and it says an error so i am confused . Sometime i get lost in the documentation out on the web andmax reference is to general at times .

so i f anyone has any suggestions on these issues i really appreciate and keep up the goo d work....

[philipbruton]

hello echo, echo, echo ( just messing, must be bored)



- firstly,try and make use of the photon shaders, these help iliminate photon tracing errors also, do u have glossiness/ shininess set above zero ? (also encasing your scene in a sphere with normals inverted and a photon shader to this also helps)

- secondly, make sure the amount of photons being emitted bty a light is greater than the amount of samples.

- thirdly, u may want to make use of the local or global energy and falloff photon settings



good luck with your new job :)



phil b

[JasonCamp]

well it took me a while but i finnaly reproduced glare , buy looking at the venus and glare max files/ accually when i downloaded the glare one it didnt work for so i took a look at the venus settings and compared to see what was creating it ... , accually i probably had it down several times i just canceled the render while it was in progress not knowing it creates the glare at the end of the render process GO FIGURE ! lolhttp://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

[JasonCamp]

now that i am geting the hang of glare (sort of) i am tinkering with the dof option... when i use the mr-dof for the camera , the options are limited and the standard dof has a lot... but when it it renders black.. altho when i do a preview it works wonders on my perspective view... i have it set to default , wondering if anybody has some glare.... er light to shed on this topic ? do i have to use the mr-dof or am i suppose to wait for 12 render passes to see the picture unfold.. maybe its because i didnt select the option in the mr render for dof ? even tho it does a hell of a good job when i do a preview ?

[eks]

greetings,

im doing an animated short and im trying to use mental ray to render it, so render times must be slow. i did achieve that renderable low times by splitting scenery from characters, since in most shots the camera won´t move. but i do need shadows from this characters on the scenery on many shots.

i do not really need GI shadows, which is something that mental ray will not do, as stated in this thread:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=147630&highlight=matte+mental

but it does cast raytraced shadows over a matte material. the big problem is, time to render this triples!!! from 5min per frame to 18min per frame! here´s two stills: (obviusly, only the characters)

http://www.singularstudios.com/users/eks/matteinmr.jpg

the image on the right do have the shadows i need, but with an impossible time to render. what i did was just apply a (max) matte/shadow material to the floor.

there is a shadow transparecy (base) shader in mental ray connection slot for shadow, but i did not find any explanation about it. i applyed it and send it to render and... well... it´s been almost half an hour and mental ray is still casting photon emission, so i guess it´s no use.

any clues?



eks

PS: oh!! btw! this thread is great!! a bit messy, but nothing that a search button would not find what you need. i did found only one post about matte thought, a while back and without answer...

[castelle]

What's a lume material?...any example?

[JeffPatton]

There are plenty of lume shaders discussed within this thread, just have a look through it. I've also discussed them outside the thread, do a search for lume and you should find the other postings. As well, you can read the lume tools help in 3dsmax6 by going to help>additional help>lume tools help. Also a search on google for (lume tools) will turn up info.

Jeff

[castelle]

ok cool. thnx for the info.

[JasonCamp]

glare + self illume or glow = true neon, but im still tring to get the brighness of the self ilume or glow object to output more light then a sertain area brightness and everything seams to affect just a certain area, no on lights are on and i have gi and photons and fg pumped up enuff to cause a meltdown, heh oh well ill play with it more still tho after so long i have achieved a true neon.. thanks to the glare now my neon lights (or much other things like lightning ,fire, and other ) have a true glow to them now with radiant like perfection... muhahaha thx jeff patton, and all the others
you can put another newbe taught scratch down nowhttp://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

[JasonCamp]

well ive been messing with this all night and for the life of me i cant get it to get the light emmiting from the surface of a self ilume material to reach diffent distances as if it was a light itself.. i can drop a light in an object with corectly shaded materials to create the effect but thats sort of like doing duble work , even tried the architech material to shader and messsing with the cd lume of it ...
i did produce a glitter of photons , where i didnt want them in 1 direction... my test is with a slime splat... the border of the slime splat has very little light comeing out of it but the top with the most surface area is lighting up the walls like wild, when glare finnaly applies itself its blinding ... , good but i just want the light to be more gi , anybody know of what to do ? gi is on and im pritty sure its all set right , perhaps i should change the uv settings , hmhm

[JasonCamp]

well droping a omni light in my object (with parti volume & dielectric shadeing) with self ilume and glare has produced a radioactive like material, good for me lol, geting the hang of this , nice flares with parti vol, when set up right according to the documentation thx jeff

http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon2.gifstuck in photon maddness

[JeffPatton]

Hellion -
The main issue here is that the Glow (lume) shader doesn't create actual photons. Which is what you need for the GI to brighten up the scene. The only work around is to actually put a light near the glowing object, exclude the object from that light and setup the proper amount of falloff.

So unless you can figure out a way for an object to actually cast photons in MR, your stuck with the work arounds (which are not bad). But as you mentioned, it's just another step you have to do.

Jeff

[akropol2000]

I desperately need some help with exterior/interior scene ...

I'm rendering a building with a large roof overhang ... basically that over hang creates a very dark shadow and no matter what I do my photons won't get there ...

basically it's a semi exterior rendering ... u see , the problem that i have is that if i raise the energy levels, the rest of my building becomes white and washed ... i don't know how to approch it ...

any lighting experts ... please ???

[ToddD]

Hey Jeff, I'm wondering if anyone here has the ability to convert the shader used in either maya or xsi(not sure which) that allows self illuminated objects to emit photons. I think it is a photon shader, that would rectify the issue hellion is having, and be quite handy for the rest of us! hehehe So if you guys are listening, and have the ability, let us all know!!!!!! Thanks for your efforts


Todd

[Mills]

Hi all


Thanks to Jeff Patton for starting this thread and to every one how has contributed to it
I have learned a hell of a lot from this 78 page thread.

I am a new B so I don’t have anything to contribute as yet but I need some help pls

I want to create e snow environment e.g. a ski cottage where snow has just fallen

I am not sure how to go by doing it.



I saw a model on turbosquid witch is similar to what I want to greate

http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/167985/Action/FullPreview (http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/167985/Action/FullPreview)

I am sure mental ray can make it look much better

or http://www.pixelschmiede.ch/final_finished.jpg
done with vray by "themaxxer" at "chaoticdimension"

The ice diffusion shader that Jeff created on on page 73 is amazing
I almost want to make something like that.

Can someone pls give me some advice on how to create something like it.

Thanx

Mills

[JeffPatton]

Todd - Maybe max7 will have the updated Mental Ray and a photon shader would be included? We'll all just have to wait and see I suppose.

Mills - For snow, I'd start here:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117715

Jeff

[ToddD]

I guess so Jeff, hey any workaround for glass in a photon scene? Seems the glass deadens shadows cast from an outdoor sunlight for example....and forget adding a glass coffee table to the same room. I tried phys-phen, architectural, standard raytraced, and a glass mat I made myself. I am guessing having the glass generate caustics might be an option, but that bites lol Any info?

[CHRiTTeR]

When using glass with photons in mental ray, caustics must be enabled :)

Im not a mental ray user but this I read somewhere...

[JasonCamp]

well i have sort of a work around for glow , it however isnt working how i want it still, im useing the blur effect and messing the map mask , according to help your supose to be able to assign the material id to the blur and or the object g-buffer tag and be able to blur just that object or material.. er heh it seams to be like its not working correctly.. although when i assign the material id to 0 it applies it to the the whole thing but when when i put it on 1 , 2 , and 3 wich i have assigned it does nothing , unless i have a accuall map in the map mask block, in when i blurs all 3 reguardless to what numbers are in the id box,,:scream: i had it working really good too then i realised what if i have more objects creating light , and cloned my glowing cube and changed its light
but if all else fails i can just use the luminance and blur just the lighting in the whole thing.. wich i dont want either but at least its creating the effect i want,
i tried to do a fog system... that just sat there and did nothing for a while .. hmm maybe a dense partical fog with just enuff ior will work ?

[mrBrown13]

I desperately need some help with exterior/interior scene ...
I'm rendering a building with a large roof overhang ... basically that over hang creates a very dark shadow and no matter what I do my photons won't get there ...
basically it's a semi exterior rendering ... u see , the problem that i have is that if i raise the energy levels, the rest of my building becomes white and washed ... i don't know how to approch it ...
Did you try logarithmic env settings?
And you could try to fake it to just place a light under the over hang and only include the over hang.
More details on kind of lighting (sun / sky / area) and MR settings (GI / FG ) are needed to get a 'brighter picture'. A sample rendering could be helpfull for the 'experts' as well.

[JasonCamp]

well i tried everything , then when i walked next to a neon sign the other day i realised that the standard glow doesnt really look like a neon signs type glow anyway, the glow is accually more like what glare does, so my neon like nukular waste sludge material just needs to be tweeked with glare i guess.. on this streak image.. its supose to be a grayscale tga right ?!?

[Gluteus Maximus]

Here's some basic cammo mats I made, they are by no means for just slapping on, they are to be put in the diffuse slot, so they can be used for cloth if you add a bump map right for it, or they could be metal if you say put them in a raytrace material.

Here's the .mat.
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/drturbo/3d/examples/cammo.mat
And heres a pic
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/drturbo/3d/examples/cammo.jpg

[stefan]

Does enybody used volume node in mental ray shader? I woud like to achive cloud like effect. Any tutorial? Shoud I leave surface slot empty? Any achieved images? How can I control density in volume /With whitch parameter/? To many questions?
Thanx

[ILS]

i was actually trying to do that with SSS. it sort of crashed on me (the deffuse shader) when i tried to do some stuff to emulate dust.

[Gluteus Maximus]

forgot to say with mine, it will have to be a shellaic or blend material for the cammo, as that composite map is i dont know what you call it, a sub map or whatever.

[JeffPatton]

I was working on this over at CGarchitect and figured I might as well post it here too. Just a reminder of how usefull the dirtmap shader can be. Here, I rendered an ambient light pass (just for color, no shadows), then use the replace material button to globally apply a dirtmap shader to the scene and render for the shadows.

Then simply composite the two renders together in photoshop (or similar). The render times are fairly quick (3 and a half minutes for this example).

This shows the two renders (ambient & dirtmap pass)
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/dirt-ambient.jpg

Composite image (I went a little crazy on the blur...I know)
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/dirt-omnis.jpg

Jeff

[dynamic duotone]

Very nice Jeff,

When you bring it in Photoshop are you just using the blending modes in the layers palette - i.e. Screen, Overlay, Multiply? - ALSO - Are you tweeking anything else?


stefan
"How can I control density in volume /With whitch parameter/? To many questions?"

in the volume shader, I found that the "Extinction" attribute controls the density, and seems to be somewhat tied to your photon energy - it is Scale sensitive - meaning - the smaller the object the higher the Extinction number needs to be.

DD

[JeffPatton]

Ooops, forgot to mention the layer settings...yes the ambient pass is the base layer, then I put the dirtmap pass on a new layer above that and set the layer to multiply. I will also blur a copy of the ambient light and use it on a new layer (set to screen..or overlay), to get the soft look.

Jeff

[stefan]

Back to volume shader. I am loking for something like this: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/arboretum/clouds.htm

This site is online a while ago. So there is may be some free or comercial application using full aproach or just this shader. I am interested how to make something like this using mental ray for max.

THanX

[JasonCamp]

well ive been working on my glare , i know how to make one now ,,, i just need to know how to make the damn streaks , i think i had it last night makeing the spread the size of the streak image i wanted sofar i had made it but the center was really bright and covered even the slightest lit item , then i changed my lighting and i think i took off the expose control and now its taking like forever to do my streak, and when i do it with the way ive been seeing nothing really happens, the streak just looks like a slight glow..wich lol i was wanting so long ago..but i just want a lens flare coming off the highlight portion of the ooze... does anybody know the proper settings on the streak, im useing a predefined lens flare.. flat.. but works good enuff .. its either a grayscale tiff or tga ive been tring

[hamu73]

How can you make a shader/mat for an ice cube
with all those little white spots and all and some cracking streaks
thanks

[opus13]

i recently reformatted by system, and forgot to back up my 'unhidden' .mi files.

after reinstallation i go back through unlocking, but now max wont even start! are there any particular instances of 'hidden' that i should NOT delete?

also, would someone be kind enough to post the 'unhidden' files for me?

thank you!

[Ech0]

where do you unlock these hidden files

[JeffPatton]

opus13 - Somewhere earlier in this thread I posted my edited .mi files, here's the link again.
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/mray-files.zip
Try those and see if it works. If not, delete the mental ray folder and do a restore from your 3dsmax CD and it will replace all those files.

Ech0 - The in's and out's of the hidden files are discussed throughout this thread, so grab a cold one, sit back start on page 1 and dig in... :)

Jeff

[opus13]

yep, just what i needed, thanks!

everyhting went fine except for the physics_phen.mi. that just pitched a fit :)

edit/

oh yeah, i just noticed a minute ago tha you have some extra camera shaders in there. are there adjustable parameters for the Physical Lens DOF? or is it all dependent on scene scale?

[Ech0]

thanks i will do that need to really sit down and go through all of it anyway

[loran]

as Stephan ask before... any solution to create volumetric material for mentalRay ?
I try some stuff by using "edge Lume",wich is nothing but a fresnel falloff...

How to do that (1997 mental ray render) in max?

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/arboretum/images/clobig.jpg

[maxFX]

How can you make a shader/mat for an ice cube
with all those little white spots and all and some cracking streaks
thanksI think this shader here will help you achieve what u need....
Check it out and tell me :)

Here is the link to the shader

http://animation.maxfx.gr/shaders/ice.mat

Cheers :thumbsup:

[NBF]

Hi don't know if this has been covered yet but has anyone used or heard of
md_subscatter, md_diffuse, and transvol201 they are all .mi files.
I have not had a lot of time to play but I did come up with a very nice skin shader using
the md_subscatter also the transvol201 looks very promising if tweeked right.

[hamu73]

thanks alot maxFX I will try that out
thanks a bunch for your help

[JasonCamp]

hey i think i found out a good way to emit light from a material
on the self illumination or luminosity map box put a output shader, then bump up the output to multiply the amount of brightness you want ... and turn on final gather ,, it should make the brightness spread out

on a side note im geting good results with useing a pic file lens flare for the streaks in my glare , also i push up the spread depending on how big the picture is also useually keeping the scale to about the same, to make the lens flare a pic i just simply use the video post and make a lens flare and then save it to a pic file .. still not very defined but sence i havent got a clue on what makes the glare act as if it was a defined bloom ill keep tring ..

[JasonCamp]

well i added a lot more detail to the streaks with reduceing the number of rays and makeing most of them pure white , im refering to the video post efx that is , then i saved it as a tif file and pic file to see if there was accually any differnce... there was none... any way its turning out accually good testing with the overlay to just see the streaks alone helps
im accually quite pleased with the lens flare , glow and all the other nifty video post efx are turning out , so i guess ill just use them , at least it works lol..
also i dont know if this has been mentioned ... im still runing max6 stock install... has anybody updated to the service pack 1 ? it says it fixes a lot of things accually and has a patch for mental ray... if i wasnt away from home right now id download it , anybody runing it ?
:argh: <-- cant believe hes been tring to get a dam streak that works well for the past 4 days
oh also i just tried making the black areas of the streaks image on the tif file compleately trasnparent with adobe , that deffinantly added the perfic type streaks :P

[akropol2000]

I really hope that someone here can help me out with the problem that I encountered using MentalRay.

I have created a scene (architectural -exterior) it has couple raytrace materials, skylight and a direct light .... nothing complicated .... using only Final Gathering (250) for rendering ...

When I render it at, let say 800x600 it takes about 3-4 mins to render .... no errors ... nothing - everything is totally fine ...

But when I raise it up to 4000x2800 it starts to render and then .... BOOM ... ERROR MESSAGE : MENTAL RAY HAS ENCOUNTERED A FATAL ERROR AND THE APPLICATION WILL NOW SHUTDOWN. tHE ERROR IS: MEM 0.9 031005:CANNOT FREE MEMORY.

and thats it ....

I can't do anything .... It is very frustrating to not being able to do anything about it ....
I also happened to own VIZ 2005 wich is pretty much identical to MAX (the rendering part). So I opened my scene there ... ....same thing ...

I checked in Preferences-> Rendering-> Bitmap Paging ... and I tried to raise all the parameters there ... but I don't think it helped because it crashed just the same way ...

anyway ... I really hope that somebody can help me !!!

PLEASE HELP !!! I'm frustrated to the level where you start to pull your hair out ....

[joske]

i am having the same problem overhere akropol :rolleyes:
haven't found a solid solution sofar, but i think i'm on a lead here, i'll tell u if it worked when my renders are finished on monday..., and don't have the error message you mentioned...
check this out (from the user reference files) :

Large BSP

The Large BSP method has the same controls as BSP. See Ray-Trace Acceleration: Parameters for the BSP Methods.

This method is a variant of the BSP method. Portions of the partitioning tree it uses can be swapped in and out of memory. This enables mental to render very large scenes, at a cost of ray-tracing time. Use this method for very large ray-traced scenes, and also when Use Placeholder Objects is turned on (see Translator Options Rollout (mental ray Renderer)). Use Placeholder Objects is recommended when you are doing distributed rendering.

tried something else as well :
in the processing tab / translator options / memory options i set the memory limit from 1536 (default) to 5000 mb...
donnow if it 'll work this time, but we'll wait and see

[loran]

Volumetrics as I ask before... Does anyone know a solution to create volumetric material for mentalRay ?
I try some stuff by using "edge Lume",wich is nothing but a fresnel falloff...

How to do that (1997 mental ray render) in max?

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/arboretum/images/clobig.jpg

[akropol2000]

Hey Joske ... thanks for your info ... the links won't work though...

But I think I have some progress as well ...

I increased bitmap paging sizes , plus the memory limit in processing tab as well ...

and it dit render 45% of my image ... but crashed again ...

Now I'm going to increased that thing even more ... til I get 100% ...it looks like this parameters work out alright !!!

I hope my tests will help you as well ...

Thanks

[JasonCamp]

hey i was browsing the mr upload site and got the mr defusion file and when i try and load it it says my mentalray.dlz is missing .. anybody have any input ?

[rizob]

hey hellion, its a good idea to get the new service pack, we were rendering a project with animated lights in mental ray, and it would calculate the first frames lighting, then carry that over to all frames, we were freakng out, so animating light multiplier settings will not work without the service pack.

[JasonCamp]

cool rizob ill have to get that patch when i get back..

on a side note i think i have perfected the glare bloom to my liking , i used a 6 sided star in photoshop and its pure white with a small falloff on the edges , now my glares bloom looks as if it was realistic,, now on to a challenge .. volume causistics er heh i cant even spell it let alone do it lol.. but hey my glare looks good now ! lol

[rtpdesigns]

I started using Max, or really any 3d software about 3 days ago so please bear with me I dont know exactly what I am talking about yet. Well basically I have been working on my companies logo, and I was looking to create a 3d version with Max for use in some movie clips of ours and mainly because they just look so cool. So what I did was follow the tut on this post on how to create the effect at the begining of the post. What I really am looking to do is create somthing that looks just like the first large blue image. I have tried everything in the tutorial and other resources to try and make this look correct but I am having no luck.

In sum up, this is what I am having problems with. First off I love the blue glass look with out the caustics enabled on the plane. But heres my question. How did you get it to not display the bright light on the plane. I have our logo modeled and tried step by step from the tut but it just dosent look as good. How can I make it look more like the first transparent blue object. Heres what I have. Thanks in advance for any assistance on this.

http://www.rtpdesigns.com/rtpLogoGlow.jpg

[rtpdesigns]

Well first off I am definatly a newbie. I just started learning about a week ago so this is all real new to me coming from the world of web development. I have started with max since I have a friend that uses max and he could help me out with some of it. The first thing I wanted to do was to try and model and create our companies logo. Well The logo looks like it should but what I am trying to do is get it to look similar to that first glowing transparent blue spiny sphere in the begining of this post. Except with differnt colors. I can't seem to get the same transparent effect that image has, and also how well the HDRI is maped on it. It almost looks like speckels on it.

Another question I have is, In the first glowing blue spiny sphere I like the way it looks on the plane. Is there a plane? How did you make it look like it is just floating there. and has that soft glow all around it. I tried removing the plane and making the background black in the enviornment and not using the map. But diddn't look the same.

So I will post what I have any if anyone has any pointers on getting the effect I desire I would be very thankful. This is very weird to me coimng from the 2d web world. Thanks in advance.

Justin

Our company logo:
http://www.rtpdesigns.com/rtpLogoGlow.jpg

[JeffPatton]

If I remember correctly, I didn't use a HDRI with that blue glass render. The speckles came from the stepping of the parti-volume shader, increase it and they go away, decrease it, and they appear. (similar to speckles in a GI render when you don't use enough samples).

Yes, it was on a plane and the softness came from a gaussian blur in post (photoshop). Here's another sample scene I just threw together that may offer more insight?

Render (slight blur added in photoshop):
http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/MR-SSS-2.jpg

Scene:
Download scene (http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/cg_files/MR-SSS-2.zip)

Although, you may want to look into the glow shader for your scene. It would probably render quicker. Have a look through the first few pages of this thread and you'll see some examples. I made one with some glass tubes that might work out better for you than the parti-volume.

Jeff

[DUALVORTEX]

I was working on this over at CGarchitect and figured I might as well post it here too. Just a reminder of how usefull the dirtmap shader can be. Here, I rendered an ambient light pass (just for color, no shadows), then use the replace material button to globally apply a dirtmap shader to the scene and render for the shadows.

Then simply composite the two renders together in photoshop (or similar). The render times are fairly quick (3 and a half minutes for this example).

This shows the two renders (ambient & dirtmap pass)


Composite image (I went a little crazy on the blur...I know)


Jeff
--

Hi Jeff,
Nice work!!
Were can I find any dirtmap shader tut?

Thanks!

[AdrianWilliams]

here you go DUALVORTEX

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ronchin.basket/umxprime/tutorials/AO/index.htm

:D

[DUALVORTEX]

Thanks!!!!

[DUALVORTEX]

thanks!!!!!!!

[JeffPatton]

page2, post #17. Download the HDRI scene and have a look. If you don't want the HDRI in the environment then change it to a color instead of the HDRI map.

[noclip]

:o

I think this is an interesting effect...

http://img23.photobucket.com/albums/v69/noclip/GI3.jpg

[JasonCamp]

oh ok this sucks
heh ive been tring to recreate the volume scattering efx off the
http://www.motiondesign.biz/
site uhm i know its for maya and older version of mental ray but i thought i could do it because it looked so simalar..
accually i rather just have a damn volume light or some sort of fog any kind... i guess the 3ds fog and volume lights dont work in mental ray .. so now i have to try and figure this crap out ...
i got mist lume to work ... but its limited and looks like crap. and not exactly what ill be needing in the future when i compose a full fledged masterpiece,,, and parti volume in the volume box got some odd results tring to recreate the picture on the above site, it also was hard to interpret the guy typing , he was very vauge, as if it was just oh drop this here and there and wala it just works
.. i tried flipping the normals and everything to see if that had anything to do with it .. and the best thing i could come up with was an odd looking billowy smoke that only was stuck to the walls and didnt have any "volume" to it at all
oh well ...
he did mention that if you tie it to the camera shader that it would work as well but uhm i dont want the camera to pick up the whole pictures volume all the time ... and when i do it still looks like crap.. hehe and i thought max's default volume lights and fog sucked lol arg anybody have any input ?

[JeffPatton]

Volume caustics were covered in this thread:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=108789&highlight=volume+caustic

Jeff

[JasonCamp]

well jeff as always your here for us... youd think i would have rememberd that part of the thread , doh ! damn i should have just seached here instead of the 2 + days seaching the net ... bah oh well ... thx again jeff:buttrock:

[JasonCamp]

thx again jeff... i recreated your max file , i remember somebody saying something like you had to use a boolean or something but i did it without that , now i just have to tweek it out abit and see if i can work up some layer like fog , smoke type things.. and i should be good to go with my work of art im currently planing for the start of my portfolio... im going to call it , the purification labs, sofar i have a cupple of VERY quick scetches , ill be useing the volume causitics in a lot of scenes
its still funky im tring to see right now why in the hell i have to change a bunch of options all at the same time and then try to back track and see wich one of them messed up the efx i was geting ... :shrug:
i useually can tell because of render time , god i could play with this volume efx all night ..

[jason-slab]

just a bit of a silly question, whats the quikest way to render a ambient light pass?

i'm playing with the dirtmap shader, nice stuff!
and has anyone played around with the bent normal function? wondering how to use the data from it?
http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/amb_occlude.html

[opus13]

i just came across something pretty interesting:

ive done all of my displacements by mapping images to a surface. all is good, and i lve the results. i was just messing around and diopped the 'cellular' procedural onto a sphere and... holy shit. teh processing time was just rediculous!

i am thinking that it is because bitmaps hold a finite number of levels in their gradients, but a procedural texture would technically hold an infinite number of steps. ok, maybe not infinite, but might be limited to a 16bit image. which is still orders of magnitude more complex to process.

the big question now is: how to optimize the procedural texture for displacement? is there a way to force a procedural to output only 256 shades of grey? is there a way to do this without rendering to texture?

[JasonCamp]

oh its so good to get back home , i just got off the uss ronald reagan , it feels so good to get back to ventura california , and to a real bed and to my 22 inch screen and my real computer instead of that crap laptop ! whoo hoo anyways heres something that took an hour to do on my laptop and 10 min to render on my computer at home lol , of cource thx to jeff for hooking me up with the ideas ...
http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon4.gif oh yea jeff i just found out if you use a view that is accually outside the volume boxes you dont have to use the camera shader to fake the volume in the box ... you accually get a better result too .. as far as extending the fog tale i still havent got that yet lol.. but i have made a nice misty like enviroment fog ... and a burning cinder like smokey enviroment fog ..

oh and if it seems like the brightness is too much its cuz i forgot i had glare on and it
also i dont notice it on this monitor as much but theres accually boxes that are in the dark area to show the ammout of depth to the volume...
http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/store/volume.jpg

[JasonCamp]

hey guys just wanted to see what was up sence i havnt heard from ya in a while .. also if anybody is having any luck with there volume causitics..
my current project is recreating the bar scene from the move the shining, my problem lies in creating a faint amount of volume coming from the bar's light on the bar table, i tried a photometric area light with the same width and length as the glass and then caged it in the table top and put the raymarcher plane above the area light, then put the glass on top of the raymarcher its accually doing what i want to do thats not the problem ... the problem is geting a faint result with a fall off,
oh by the way .. you tried puting the projection for the light to smoke ? then draging the smoke shader to the mat lib and editing it ... whoa! smokey heh hey that accually gives me a idea maybe if it put a falloff on the projecter ill get the same smokey like falloff with out the smoke billows.. hmm ah well ill keep ya posted ..

[3Drawer]

´Does anybody know how to write a shader myself?

And where can I get more mental ray shaders?

Thx

3Drawer

[joske]

I increased bitmap paging sizes , plus the memory limit in processing tab as well ...
Now I'm going to increased that thing even more ... til I get 100% ...it looks like this parameters work out alright !!!
any luck sofar akropol? did you crack the error prob yet?
my settings allow to render the whole image... untill it's saving time and then it gives the same error :banghead:
so no real solution there
i'm rendering in crops and sticking them together in photopaint later on, but there are some small diffs. in the overlapping parts, so i don't really fancy doing that...

[3Drawer]

Hi!
I ´ve downloaded the ICE-1.max file.
I try to turn down the rendertime
her´s the result:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v88/3Drawer/ICE1_optimized.jpg

Optimized:
rendertime:: 5 min 24sec
all AA settings are the same (the same AA form orig file!)
P4 2,2Ghz; GeForce2 MX440 (hehe), 512MB DDR-Ram
Refl: 2
Refrac: 2
Sum: 1

BSP
Size: 5
Deph: 30

Material Settings:
IOR: 2.0
samples:12
refractiness: 0.8

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v88/3Drawer/ICE1_unoptimized.jpg

Unoptimized:
rendertime:: 13min 4 sec
the settings form the orig. file


What do u think?

cu!

3Drawer

ps: the orig file: http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php?act=dl&file=aWNlLTEuemlw

[ILS]

i'm not sure if this has been answered before

how do you control the amaunt of reflected light when using GI. an example is , i have a room with green walls and white ceiling and i find that too much of the green is bleeding off onto the white.

[JeffPatton]

ILS - photon maps help as well as the GI reflection & refraction numbers, check this thread out for further details:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=117519&highlight=mental+bounces
There was another post I had on this topic, but I can't seem to find it right now.. :shrug:

3Drawer - good job on the optimizations.

Jeff

[JasonCamp]

hey im tring to jump on the bandwagon too here , i downloaded the ice file and when i load it up it gives me the missing dll's error
filename: mentalray.dlz class: diffusion superclass: 0xc10

am i missing the diffusion shader or is it the mentalray dlz thats out of date ?
im runing the 3ds6 with service pack1
http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon5.gif

[3Drawer]

@ILS

I hope I understand u right...
Turn up the number of "Global Illumination photons" (standart 10000) when u using the Globaö Settings turn up the "GI Photons".

Sorry If i´m wrong...

@Jeff. Thx!:)

3Drawer

[3Drawer]

@ hellion download this file:http://animus.brinkster.net/downloads/Diffusion.zip
and look in the zip for a diffusion.dll (in the nt96x or something) and put it into the folder: max 6-mental ray-shaders

and the download this file: http://w1.702.comhem.se/~u70208061/files/Diffusion.mi

and put it into: max 6-mentalray- include
(i think u have to renamed it into only "Diffusion.mi" not with the txt)

hope that helps

3Drawer

[JeffPatton]

Ahhh, here's the thread I was looking for earlier (regarding color bleeding):
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=135978&highlight=mental+color+bleed

[JasonCamp]

thx man your awesome!:)

[3Drawer]

hehe no prob.

but I´m 3Drawer not 3Ddrawer:D

but no problem!

cu

3Drawer

[ILS]

thanks jeff that did the trick for me.

but i also have another question

i have noticed when you use seperate boxes to make up an interior space and have a light source on the outside and try to do your GI a lot of the light goes trough where the boxes meet even though they intsect or their corners snapped precicly to each other. this problem is easily solved by using a flipped normals box but there are instances where you cannot always do that - so if anyone knows why this annomaly happens and how to fix , i would like to know.

[Radacci]

if you use spotlights in scene with Global illumin and final gather, you will get lots of color bleed, if you change the spotlight to omni, you probably won't get any color bleed at all.
If you use Spot lights increase the decay value in global illuminations rollout, to decrease the color bleeding, or try to increase the falloff of the spotlight.
If you have Omni and want some color bleed decrease the decay value. Default decay is 2, and decreasing it by even 0,2 will show difference, so don't change to much :)

[ILS]

i actually used omni lights in my scene an got a lot of colour bleeding. i'm not sure if using mrOmni lights is better, frankly i haven't seen any difference.

[3Drawer]

why don´t u use the "point light"?

I always render with mr lights... don´t know why they are there if they aren´t better:shrug:

3Drawer

[_XenO_]

mrspot and mromni lights seem to do the photon emiision part of the render heaps faster than the point lights intended for the radiosity renderer, even though the point lighs get the mental ray controls, if theyre default is set to shadow map then theyre useless for mental ray .
for the most part it seems mental ray just needs a light set to ray trace shadows..

X

[3Drawer]

Who knows how to write a shader?


thx

3Drawer

[JeffPatton]

sign up for at sparks.discreet here: http://sparks.discreet.com/downloads/

scroll down to the 3dsmax miscellaneous section and download:
"How to build Mental Ray shaders for 3dsmax"

I tried, but could never get a working compile.

[3Drawer]

Thx jeff!

Is there also a book about it? Because in this tut u have to know something about programming.

thx

3Drawer

[JeffPatton]

The mental ray website has some books listed. To my knowledge, there are no books that explain writing shaders specifically for 3dsmax's connection with MR. It should be the same as other applications I suppose. However, I think you're going to have to learn a bit of C+ programming.

Here's the link to the mental images book listings:
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_3_literature/index.html

Also if your serious about writing shaders, you will want to sign up on the mental images forum (mailing list). Very helpful folks on that mailing list. Here's that link as well:
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_5_forum/index.html

[3Drawer]

OK thx jeff.

I think it´ll be no problem to learn C++ because I´ll go to a programming school in 1 month:bounce: :D

so thx for u´r help and the tips.. would be happy if I can talk with u over msn.

cu

3Drawer

[JasonCamp]

heh damn ive been lacking a bit lately , bought doom3 and havnt stoped playing it for about 3 days . its bad when a video game can make you get about 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night ... heh also i started messing with the built in level editor ,, i was blown away by the time it took to bsp the map it was not a big one tho so heh, also i noticed that doom3 has shaders , i dont know how to use them or anything yet but it has them heh.. anyways back to mr , thx to that diffusion shader im having really good looking frosted glass now .. still geting stuck on how to do this volume though ... i know how to make it but its being stubborn lol .. anyway i just orderd a p4 3.4 800mhz bus ht , and new mobo that supports the 8x agp card ive had for the past 8 months "5950" {wich i guess is now being phased out to a new form of pci go figure im still behind the power curve} and im still stuck with the damn ddr266 ram because i have a gig of it and not wanting to drop more on a new gig of faster heh... hopefully ill be able to render mr stuff fast enuff to learn what i did before i forget when its done rendering lmao
that and when this scene is done im working on right now ill deffenatly need it .. http://www.cgtalk.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

[3Drawer]

mhr... why did u use the diffusion shader for frosted glass???
u can use the standart glass shader from mentalray....

create a mr material-Put a glass shader in the "suface"- make a tick by the "Blur Tranperency" option... Render and adjust it if u need... FINISH

cu

3Drawer

[Pixero]

3Drawer, Here are some links to sites about shader programming.
Even if they are for XSI or Maya the MR Shader programming is the same.
All the spdl stuff is XSI only. The only thing missing info for Max is the GUI declarations in the .mi file. That shouldnt be a problem to pick up by studying some of the .mi files from Max. ;)

http://www.nanomation.co.uk/Tutorial.html
http://www.anibbu.com/hwee/mentalray/index.html[/url]
http://www.play.org/articles/XSI+MentalRayCustomShader.html
http://www.uni-duesseldorf.de/URZ/hardware/parallel/local/xsi/XSI_html/files/mental_ray/manual/index.html

Also feel free to try my MR shaders here: [url="http://www.sandstrom.on.to"]www.sandstrom.on.to (http://www.nanomation.co.uk/Programming-101.html)

[JasonCamp]

btw sorry for botchin up your name last time i was a little drunk at the time

ah and thx for the glass shader tip so many ways to make good looking shading here heh

[3Drawer]

@Pixero. GREAT thanks for the help!(Do u have a msn or yahoo ID?)

@=HELLION= No problem!hehe

3Drawer

[3Drawer]

ahm Pixero.
what programm do u use for programming the shaders?
C, C++, Java or the text editor?
And how can I write a *.dll?

thx

3Drawer

[Pixero]

I use Visual studio 6 but there is a free version called Visual C++ Toolkit from Microsoft.

[3Drawer]

ok thx!
Is it difficult to programm a shader?

thx

3Drawer

[battleman]

Hi, i've just been reading this topic, and tried glare in max. I can put it into the output shader slot, but when i render the scene, nothing happens. I also can't find any glare parameters so i can't adjust them to try and solve this problem myself. Could anyone help me with this?

[JeffPatton]

The glare shader has been discussed many times throughout this thread. Here's just one page that may help, there are several others.
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?p=1149056&highlight=glare#post1149056

In order to adjust the parameters, drag and drop the glare shader into the material editor.

Jeff

[externe]

Hello, Anyone has experience with this shaders ? ( image from Neil Blevins )

http://www.neilblevins.com/artgallery/media/white_orbs.jpg

or this great one : http://www.3dluvr.com/marcosss/morearni/charpu5.jpg

Can share tips or .mat about these ?
Thanks :)

[3Drawer]

hehe. The one form neil blevins is renders with the brazil skyligth and I think the advanced brazil material. The one form Marcos is renderd with ARNOLD (don´t ask where u get it... because u cant get it! Impossible!). I think u get the same result with brazil (skylight=white) and a carpaint shader (form brazil [is under :Advance brazil mat_shades_carpaint shader]) and with a little bit of GI (global Illumination)


cu

3Drawer

[externe]

Possible to have the same result without any plugins ? Nobody have a scene to share for study ?