Mental Ray - Shaders

#761

hi guys -

cheers for the comments on the shader, Deetee, Rohit and Folical9.

i’ll upload the ocean and let people have a look for its beginning to get me stumped.

a few notes up to date.

  • I have found that ocean displacement works best on a nurbs surface.

  • mental ray is very scale based, getting it to work correctly on any other surface, for the same results is proving hard.

  • the inclusion of a DSG didnt add to the shader at all

  • you may need to play around with the displacement settings in the render dialogue

  • its a good idea with waves to add wave modifiers to the mesh/surface and animate them for the roll of the ocean

i’ll upload the file tomorrow or later tonight (my time) as i have to pop out now.

Rich

#762

Heya peeps, just wanted to show yall what I cooked up with the SSS shader and some basic Max materials like Blend and Front/Back Material:

Its supposed to be really transparant skin tissue like the one found on a navelcord and internal organs (is that the correct word) Its slightly transparant and you can see a bloodvessel running through it. Or at least thats the idea :slight_smile:

Btw, no FG used. Lemme know if you need this for your mat.lib

#763

3D_Mike, first off…Ewwwwww. Second, of course I would love to add it to the .mat file. :thumbsup:

#764

Thanks a bunch Dark3k and Pixero, it works now. I know this shader originally came from XSI, but what are the steps for making it compatible with mental ray in max?

Sorry I haven’t really contributed in this thread too much. I’ll start looking into all these new shaders and see what nifty things I can make. :slight_smile:

#765

I’ve added 3D_Mikes material to the .mat file as well as a brick displacement shader I made (see image below)

Note: There are 53 shaders in the .mat file to date.

#766

awsome shader 3D_Mike :smiley:

#767

I think I finally have something to contribute. I took Daniel Rind’s diffraction shader and wrote an diffraction.mi file so that I could use it in 3D Max. Unfortunately either I can’t or the shader cant do caustics. I can accommplish them by compositing but thats a slow kludge approach and the caustics don’t have the prismatic flair thats internal to the material.


Here’s the basic glass shader with IOR at about 2.6


Here’s the diffraction shader replacing the standard MR glass.

Here’s a composite done in Photoshop using alpha channel for a mask.

If this is something that may be useful (it has the potential of greater subltety than I’ve shown here, I can post the mi file.

Bobg

#768

Alright!.. forget my last post, I was beaten to it. Clearly I seem to be inept at posting images within my message here as well. I can’t seem to save the file below th 20K maximum without making the file useless as a sample. Perhaps I still haven’t posted enough.

My ‘.mi’ file was much longer. probably because I adapted it from the original SPDL file.

I still would like to find out if caustics could be used with this without doing composites.

Bobg

#769

The images are on the
http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/mrupload/index.php
site.
diamond_glass.jpg
diamond_diffraction.jpg
diamond_composite.jpg

#770

Doesnt diamonds only shine white and not in colors? :smiley: Nice tho, will make it easier to recreate better glass effects!

#771

From the documentation of the diffraction shader: “Originally just built to be a replacement of the standard XSI Refraction node (minus the refraction bug), this shader evolved to a complete replacement and enhancement of the Refraction_Diffuse node. The glossiness value will deliver superior results to the standard node, and the dispersion values can add very much to the realism of refractive materials (especially of diamonds and crystal)”.

Now if someone that has some knowledge of both Soft and Max could give us a hint in what slot we should put this it would be great;)

The Refraction_Diffuse node…hmm there are no diffuse reflections in Max so…Maybe in a mental ray slot? If you put it in the surface slot of a mr material you lose control over everything else (like reflections). It might be that it won’t work in max regardless of where you apply it.

The search continues (unless there is some other way to accomplish diffractions in mr)

#772

Hi there, Ive been following this thread on and of… I thought maybe try it myself, I am busy now optimizing the glass-sss scene, I dunno if anybody is interested but this render took only 3.33 min. (800x600) on my comp. amd dual 2.6H and 2.0 gig memory.

I tweaking it now so if anyone is interested in the specs.
let me know…(sorry for the compression)

If I get some time I’ll try to create some materials myself…

(i dont know if this is still interesting, after so long)

Greetz Willem

#773

Hi!
this thread rocks:beer:

on the site of the diffraction shader there is also a shader deriver which can be really useful for anisotropic effect but there is only the .dll not the .mi. Is there a way to creat this missing file?
http://animus.brinkster.net/index.html

thanx:bounce:

#774

deetee,

Actually diamonds don’t just reflect white. The dispersion (prismatic spectral color) is higher in diamonds than most other commonly known clear materials. Dispersion is also referred to as ‘fire’.

Dispersion can be increased in glass through addition of lead (Pb) and highly accurate cutting. This is why Austrian crystal (Strass and Swarovski) - which is what I was actually trying to emulate - has so much fire. Diamonds have both high dispersion and a high IOR.

One day, I will get to work on something that can be accomplished without compositing. It seems that I’m closer to that with Mental Ray in Max than ever but I still hit so many ‘rendering walls’.

I have to say that I’ve learned more from this thread than any previous source since its not just theory or recipies, its actually applied.

bobg

#775

bogb: What I meant was that the diamond, a real one with the best cutting as in your scene doesnt disperse the prismlight inside of itself, but reflects the light to its enviroment, like this : http://www.goodoldgold.com/proporti.htm

#776

Here is my mi file for Deriver. With Max GUI declarations.
I havent tried it myself yet so Im not sure how it works.

Enjoy!

MI file for Deriver Mental Ray Shader

Version: 1.0 for Mental Ray Deriver Shader by Daniel Rind

Created: 11.03.2004

Author: Jan Sandstrom

#--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Deriver 3dsmax GUI declarations by Jan Sandstrom

#--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

gui “gui_Deriver” {
control “Global” “Global” (
“uiName” “Deriver”,
“category” “Texture”
)
control “passthrough” “color” (“value” 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0, “range” 0.0 1.0)
control “mode” “integer” (“value” 0, “range” 0 2)
control “north_dir” “vector” (“value” 0.0 1.0 0.0, “range” -1.0 1.0)
control “north_pos” “vector” (“value” 0.0 1.0 0.0, “range” -1.0 1.0)
control “rotation” “float” (“value” 0.0, “range” 0.0 1.0)

}

declare shader
color “Deriver”
(
color “passthrough”, #: default 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
integer “mode”, #: default 0 min 0 max 2
vector “north_dir”, #: default 0.0 1.0 0.0 min -1.0 max 1.0
vector “north_pos”, #: default 0.0 1.0 0.0 min -1.0 max 1.0
scalar “rotation”, #: default 0.0 min 0.0 max 1.0

)

version 1
apply texture
end declare

#777

deetee:

You (and the website info) are correct to a point. Diamonds, cut properly, will refract the most light back out of the front/top of the stone. However, there is dispersion internally as well that is apparent in some of these images. If you look at the sample image, in the website you provided, that shows the fire, there is some internal dispersion there. A 'Brilliant" cut diamond is meant to show ‘sparkle’ more than ‘fire’. The more ‘fire’ the less sparkle. Additionally, the lighting in the first samples on that website are from a slightly diffused light as is apperent by the shadow below it. That diffusion will significantly reduce the dispersion both withing the stone and at it leaves the the stone.

Incidentally, in my renderings, I had intentionally not modeled the geometry to represent an actual diamond cut since I’m going more for the ‘chandelier crystal’ which is definitely more fire than sparkle.

I must admit that you have a keen eye.

bobg

#778

:cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

can anyone PLEASE PLEASE tell me about the glare shader?

#779

Geoman, what additional information do you need that has not already been covered in this thread? The glare discussion begins on page 11.

#780

Hey, Folical9…where’s the .mat file with “brick displacement”…i cannot find thid file :O(