CGTalk - Photometric Lights and flakes of the car paint shader

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Ralle

01-23-2010, 04:57 PM

Hi

I'm playing around with the photometric lights in 3ds Max for the first time and have a problem with the flakes of the car paint shader.
I have set up two lights as rectangular area lights and visible in the rendering. In a tutorial from Jeff Patton (Vehicle Rendering wit Mental Ray in 3ds Max from Gnomonology) I have learnd to switch of the the specular component of the lights, when they are visible in the rendering, to avoid overblown reflections. But the problem is that the flakes of the car paint shader are only visible in specular highlights for me. But in the tutorial from Jeff Patton the flakes are visible in his renderings and I'm wondering how I can do it? Can anybody help me out with this?

Thanks

JeffPatton

01-24-2010, 03:56 AM

the problem is that the flakes of the car paint shader are only visible in specular highlights for me. You must be using 3ds Max 2010 then. The flakes on the paint material in 2009 didn't really respect the specular component of lights..IE it was a bug. Ex: http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max--3ds-max-design-2010/mentalray-problem-in-max-design-2010/post-117435/#p117435

This was fixed in 3ds Max 2010 so now when using specular dependent flakes in your car paint the flakes respect whether or not specular is enabled on your lights. So the bug is why I was able to have specular flakes without a specular light in that 3ds Max 2009 video.

Ralle

01-24-2010, 11:22 AM

Jeff, thanks for the explanation. You are right I'm using Max 2010.
Can I get anywhere the flakes shader from Max 2009? Because I have tried to turn on the reflection setting on the flakes from Max 2010, but I'm not able to recieve nice results with reflective flakes.

JeffPatton

01-24-2010, 12:37 PM

Can I get anywhere the flakes shader from Max 2009?You could use the paint.dll file from 3ds Max 2009 but of course you'd need to install 2009 to access it.

Because I have tried to turn on the reflection setting on the flakes from Max 2010, but I'm not able to recieve nice results with reflective flakes.You should be able to get good results from the raytraced flakes or by using specular flakes and specular emitting lights. There's a rather lengthy thread in the 3ds Max forum on flakes that you may also find helpful: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=834464

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