Blur in raytrace and Colour map

[Marcel]

The color channel she's talking about is named the diffuse channel in Max (not to be confused with diffuse level).

Blurring raytrace maps used to be possible, but strangely enough I think they've removed that feature from Max5 (it was a crappy feature anyway, not very useable).

[Pickman]

Hi and thx for your reply, my question then would be : how do you blur raytrace maps ?? I'm no expert so excuse if my question sounds a bit dum :surprised

[Bennels]

The blur features can be accessed when anti-aliasing is turned on for your material or map, however this will really slow down your renders. From memory the Blur offset will blur your reflections.

Hope this helps

[Pickman]

Hi Bennels, I've tried the blur offset, antialiasing turned on but it actually does nothing at all while rendering ?? any other suggestion....??:thumbsdow Nothings comes up.

[Marcel]

If you need blurred reflections on an object without a lot of self reflections (the object reflection itself), then you can use the refract/reflect map.

Somewhere in the bottom part of the refract/reflect map you can choose to render out the map to 6 files, that way you can touch it up in Photoshop. You may want dummy (for the pick object button) replacing the object when you render out the maps, so the object itself isn't obstructing the view of the camera rendering the 6 maps.

Using the blur settings of the reflect refract map you can blur real nice (if I'm correct the blur settings are a percentage so 0.03 means 3% blur, so use small numbers).

Rendering out the reflection maps may seem like a crappy solution, but it actually creates very good results (and it's a lot faster sine the reflections are prerendered) so try it out!
One warning, rendering out those 6 maps can take a lot of time, and there is no way to interrupt the process, so save your files first in the case you want to kill Max if it takes to long.

[Ian Jones]

*BUMP*

I'm not sure how old this thread is but rahter than starting a new one, I thought I' d revive this.

My question to Marcel, or anyone else is... what does he mean when he says 6 maps? I'm pretty clear on everything else...

Are there any other ways to get blurry refelctions that are better?

[Marcel]

My question to Marcel, or anyone else is... what does he mean when he says 6 maps? I'm pretty clear on everything else...

It's a cubic reflection map, and as we all know, a cube has 6 sides :)
So when you render out the reflection map, you will not end up with 1 single image, but 6 images (top, bottom, left, right, front, back). With those 6 images a 360 degree map is created, that can be used to fake reflections and refractions.

Check out the refrect/reflect map and see how it works...

[Ian Jones]

aahh, ok. thx for the quick response. How do I handle a more complex object though? I was under the impression that that 'texture baking' to an image isn't an option? I am pretty new to 3d though, so I'll have to investigate some more.

[Marcel]

Texture baking is indeed not a good idea (for an animation), since reflections depend on the angle you look at the object. When you change the angle, the reflection will move. For a single still it might work, I have never tried.

Most object work well with the reflection maps, especially when you do some tweaking in photoshop (since it's just a series of images, you can change them as you want).

If you cannot do without 'real' blurred reflections you could try to use the standard scanline renderer for blurred raytraced reflection, but the result will probably not be okay. The only solution you then have left is third party renderers with good soft reflection support. But try the reflection maps first, it'll save you a lot of rendertime when the results turn out to be good enough.

(By the way, for a long time Renderman didn't have real raytraced reflections, only reflection maps. You can see that they still did a lot of good stuff with it)

[Ian Jones]

thx man... I'll investigate my options. :thumbsup:

[gaggle]

A theory:

Use the scanline to render, not blurred or anything, just set up the basic reflections.

Render reflections to a seperate layer, and in a compositing-program you blur the reflection-layer.

You can likely play around to get depth-layers as well if you require bluring to gradually ramp up across a surface. It's not perfect, not by a longshot, but I'm thinking it might be enough..

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