Mental Ray - Shaders

#3965

Hey MasterG can you help me a bit? I need you help to create ocean shader for tidal waves.

I was working on ocean tidalwave shader last month which project is on hold due to other works. Here is the rendered image so far.

I am using “Mentalray material” with reflect(base) map in surface slot , and in the “input” slot of that map, i am using refract(base) map with masked gradient ramp mapped transperency. so i m getting refraction on the edge of the tidal wave where it’s bended.

Also i am getting black spots (as marked by redcircle in image) for all frames of the animation. I am using one direct light without any shadow and FG is turned on(low preset).

EDIT : forgot to mention, I am also using “mia_exposure” map to boost intensity of sky and get reflection in water and sky will be removed in compositing. sky is gradient map as background.

I tried to use A&D material but not getting right look of tidal waves.
Here is the refernce i am refering. http://www.imageworks.com/index.php
(“surfs up” in video section)

I would appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance,
J.

#3966

I’m curious to see the A&D results and your A&D water material settings. The A&D material should work great for this scene. Did you try turning off the “Skip reflections on inside (except total internal reflection)” option on the A&D material? Turning that off should make the refractions look better (assuming the wave is solid geometry).

#3967

Thanks jeff for help!

Yes i tried A&D material with water preset. I changed diffuse amount to 1.0 and used gradient ramp map (Blue-White-Blue colors) to have white water(Foam) on the top edge of the tidal wave. and used the same map in refraction slot but map colors changed to black&white to masked the transperency. so i can get a bit refraction on bended(Curved) part of tidalwave.

As for geometry, I used high dense plane(with 300x300 Segments) with FFD modifier. so tidalwave shape is given by FFD.

My pc is currently busy with some archi. interior renderings. but after finishing it , i will email or post file soon. Thanks

#3968

Yes (because you said it) in your first answer.

The last thing I was trying was set the “mr Voxel Resolution” from the default 5 to 1. I could not see any difference and the rendering is much faster too (it is in the Hair and Fur in Environment and Effects Dialog.

I hope next version Max comes with a “Quick hair” button than sets all these things automatically :slight_smile:

#3969

Any new tests with Max2008 super duper production shader?
U can enable it with removing “hidden” in its mi files.

#3970

What’s the name of the shader?

#3971

It’s not A shader, it’s quite a few very useful shaders:

mr Raytype Switcher
mr Raytype Switcher (advanced)
mr Raytype Switcher (environment)
mr Card Opacity
mr Motion Blur
mr Motion Vector Export
mr Matte/Shadow/Reflection
mr Camera Map
mr Mirror Ball
mr Gray Ball
mr Gamma & Gain
mr Render Subset of Scene

#3972

Hi Jeff,

May I ask what settings you use to create the blending plane/background that you use in your car scenes? I’m trying to find a material setting for the plane ground that woudl change along with teh environment background color (say white to black). If that’s not possible, then a white cream plane with 10-20% reflection with blending background I can work with.

I’ve seen a shot on one of your car scenes (white cream) that looked awsome! (don’t ask when or where lol)

Much apprecaited in advance as always.

D2

#3973

hi

here is a complet list of all new mental ray Shader with paramater Screen Shots and a short documentation.

http://forum.german-mentalray-wiki.info/viewtopic.php?t=1002

mfg
hot chip

#3974

While I’m not Jeff and don’t am not exactly sure what you mean, but to get a ground plane to blend with the background all you really need to do is have an opacity map set to ground plane. I myself use an opacity map that has a circular blend from the white of the center to the black on the edges and that’s it, ground blending with background. And it works with all sorts of other material settings attached to the plane.

It would really be useful for someone knowing german to actually translate it, screenshots are welcome even alone, but knowing what the comments say would help a lot.

#3975

Also, are there any other useful shaders in Max 2008 that did not have time to pass Q&A yet and are hidden yet quite useful? I’ve checked the files and there’s quite a bit of hidden things there, but other than production shaders, I wasn’t sure about the ones found in other files.

Any sort of help is appreciated,

#3976

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fforum.german-mentalray-wiki.info%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ft%3D1002&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

#3977

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxKxPy5oeOs

#3978

Hi all -
I have been away from Mental Ray for a while and now I’m trying to figure out how to create materials to match some things I have done in Maxwell and Fry.

Have a look at this material test:

This is a 4-5 layer material I made in Fry that is just placed on a basic cylinder with an alpha/opacity/cutout map to define the shape. I cannot figure out how to create something similar with Mental Ray. Basically I can create the different parts with different A&D material settings (gold foil, silver foil, main label area) but can’t seem to get them combined into one mat like I did with MW or Fry.

How do you create complex mixed materials with MR? I tried the Composite mat - no joy because I can’t seem to weight-map the different materials, they just overlay each other.

Blend might be okay, but I can only mix 2 materials and I need at least 3 (gold foil, silver foil, and main label). I could probably figure out a workaround to use Blend, but I would like to know how to do this anyway.

I tried using JS_Multilayers but either I cannot figure it out or it won’t let me combine multiple alphas on one material to create the right material look and still have the cutout. I looked for some docs/help on that one but didn’t find very much.

I am hoping I’m just missing something really simple, any help much appreciated. :slight_smile:

b

#3979

Hi Simms,
Not sure if it works in Max but you could try the Layer 8 Mix from ctrl studios.
Or you could try nesting blends one blend inside another.

cheers

#3980

Hey Duncan - thanks, I’ll try the nested blend approach - should have thought of that!

I think I did see that Layer 8 shader, but if it’s the one I saw I believe it’s only for Maya (?)

Thanks for the help.
b

#3981

Hi guys, first id like to thanks to all the members posting in this thread, all are very helpful , specially Jeff Patton, and MasterZap.

My post its for a theme that has been talked before, but i got no satisfatory results with that.
Im trying to do a realistic sand shader based on a A&D material, but as u can see in the pic below its not very good yet…, ive read a post in this same thread from Ivan Ulicny, he made this tutorial that i think looks great, but i cant get the same results.
If someone want to help and modify, make, or just give some advice to finish this shader would be great.

thanks!

the max9 scene

so far…

some references…

01

02

this is from Ivan Ulicny

#3982

try this one from jan sandström
http://www.pixero.com/files/JS_MultiLayers.zip

works fine over here

#3983

Well Mariano that sand shader looks cool, but that’s the thing, there are hundres of types of sand. and depend, but that one looks cool to me, it’s very look-a-like the sand from my country beaches.

#3984

try this one from jan sandström

Thanks - I did try that one but I wasn’t getting far with it. I’ll give it another try. Do you use it with Max 64 or 32? Maybe that was the issue for me… I’m starting to get somewhere with nested blend materials though - thanks again Duncan. Either way, I’ll post the end product if it ever gets good enough.

b