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View Full Version : DX Display in viewports, how useful?

javierdl
02-15-2006, 12:13 AM
I was just reading about this feature in the Mtl Editor, from what I read in the Help file it sounds very interesting, but it doesn't give much insight or concrete examples of its usefuness.
Would anyone care to share opinions/insights/comments on this one in order to get a better grasp of this?

Thanks in advance,

The info below is an excerpt from the Max8 Help file.

Material Editor > DirectX Manager rollout

http://www.javierdl.com/temp/rol_viewport_manager_max.gif

DX Display of Standard Material—When on, displays the active material as a DX shader. You can save the material as an FX file by clicking Save As .FX File.

For full support of this feature, DX9 must be active.

Warning: Not all standard 3ds Max features can be represented by DX shaders, and you it is possible to create a standard material that is more complex than a DX video card can display. DX shaders do support the most commonly used material components: diffuse color (or texture), specular highlights, opacity, bump mapping, and reflections.



DPC
robinb
02-15-2006, 01:02 PM
Useful for all sorts of things actually. It's sort of designed to preview direct x shaders for games work, but there are lots of other things that you might find it handy for. You can see specular maps, bump or normal maps, per pixel specular highlights, blended materials, self illumination maps, all sorts of things. It won't represent what you see in renders very accurately, but if you're trying to get two layers on a mixmap to line up work out the brightness of a spec map or something like that it could help.

Give it a go. Make a material that normally wouldn't display much in the normal viewport mode and press the button and see what happens.

I found it very slow when displaying more than one material at a time on my hardware for some reason and a bit unstable, so save first.
javierdl
02-15-2006, 05:05 PM
I found it very slow when displaying more than one material at a time on my hardware for some reason...



I am so glad you mentioned this, because I did do it for many mtls, 10 probably. Boy! my pc was crawling! Although it's a recent machine (45 days ago), AMD 3800 64 X2 with 1Gb ram, 256Mb of video-ram. I immediately suspected it was the DX display.
I will use it carefully then ;)

Thanks Robin :)
SamSed
02-16-2006, 01:59 AM
take a look at this:

http://download.autodesk.com/media/3dsmax/directx_max8_350k.wmv
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