Played around with the new options a bit. Tried out rendering a room with skyportals and depth of field and having mental ray’s glare rendered on top of it. It has no post work done whatsoever, lighting and shades are a result of photographic exposure. Image is a tad bit too bright and it took a good time to render because of very resource demanding raytraced depth of field.
Other than doing DoF in post through zdepth, there isn’t alot of other choices I assume?
Also, does anyone know where can I actually find one of the production shaders, the matteshadow one? It’s supposed to have it’s own material and everything, but I simply can’t seem to be able to find it (and before you ask, yes I did take the hidden tags off from the shader files, they aren’t supposed to be hidden, and I can find other production shaders in Max). Must be simply missing something.
That’s very good, however it looks to me like a label you can do in one material - it’s the combination of printed label area with the two foils that I was struggling with. I basically wanted a way to have 3 different A&D materials weight mapped together. The nested blend mat seems to do the trick, just needs a bit more mental work on my part to keep track of what is where
Very nice job on the paper label though - totally believable.
b
Yea well I don’t know I’m doing, lol. Thanks anyway. But I’v been using MAx for like 5-6 as a hobby. So I’m no expert. I don’t understand why Mental Ray doesn’t have those layer thingys yet I guess that is why people use Vray.
I believe you can do it with mental ray but in a very cheesy way. I’m guessing you have to use multi-shellac within each other. Ask Jeff I’m sure he knows. I’m guessing but I’d say a Map in the gloss slot. I’d say Spec but A&D doesn’t call it that, lol.
I havea question about rendering paper products. What is the theory/concept behind render realistic paper material. I use to just put an img in the diffuse and that was it. But that doesn’t look realistic by any means. Currently my theory isgive it a lite bumpmap and low gloss. Anybody. Also glossy paper. Thanks.
and simmsimaging you rendering is beautiful. How did you make the bump texture map.
If you unhid it, you should see it immediately in your “material” list as “mr Matte/Shadow/Reflection” !
I.e. just click a sphere in your material editor and click the button named “Standard” (or whatever is your default material type) to pick a new material type. If it is not there… you didn’t unhide it, or you broke something while unhiding stuff… if you open the “mental ray message window” and click the “Open on Error” end restart max, does it show some errors on startup related to the production_max.mi file?
and simmsimaging you rendering is beautiful. How did you make the bump texture map.
Thanks. I made it in Photoshop - probably using Eye-Candy filters along with some handwork to get the foil base, and then a brushed texture for the horiztontal striations. Nothing to fancy really, but I can’t remember exactly how I did it now. If you also use Maxwell or Fry I have posted the material on both of their materials sites - you can get it from there.
Can’t help you much on the paper stuff but I think you are on the right track. Paper always has some kind of tooth so adding bump will help. I’ve had some good results using high roughness values in the A&D material as well, but I haven’t really done very much yet.
I got it working after resetting mr files, probably made a typo somewhere before. Strangest thing. But it’s there now, thanks
My other problem still remains though, I must be doing something wrong with the new mental ray motion blur that’s added in post, since it displays the original model quite clearly beneath the post effect. I read something about time contrast in some documents, but can’t seem to find them in Max (nor in their user reference for that matter). Is there a specific workflow to be followed when using mr_Motion_Blur?
Hi all -
I’m running into an odd thing with Mental Ray:
Notice that the highlight/reflection of my area light on the left is being cut-off. This corresponds to the edge of a cylinder that is used to make the label, and which is being cut out by an alpha map in an A&D material (actually - it’s two A&D’s put together into a Blend material)
In any case, this ONLY happens when caustics are on.
My question is: do the caustics not recognize alpha masks for object’s opacity? Is there some setting in there somewhere for caustics to use alphas? If not, how would I go about creating an alpha masked object like my label, but have caustics still work?
Yes, this is the result of the opacity map. That’s probably fixed by using the production shader mr Card Opacity that makes opacity areas as ‘true’ opacity instead of simply looking like a different one. Can’t be 100% sure, but from reading the description in theory it should work.
That’s probably fixed by using the production shader mr Card Opacity
Okay - thanks for that. I’m waiting for my copy of 2008 to arrive still - should be any day I hope. I’ll check that out. Is anyone aware of workarounds for the current version (I’m using Max9)
No, the opacity function in mia_material is actually the same as “mr Card Opacity” so that shouldn’t change anything.
Are you saying you have a separate cylinder for the label, with an opacity map? And this affects the highlights on the glass… hmm… it shouldn’t.
OH WAIT:
Which max version? Original Max 9 or the service pack?
There was an issue w. the importance propagation and opacity in the original max 9 release… that could perhaps have this “effect”… hmm. It shouldn’t have anything to do with caustics though… hmm…
Are you saying you have a separate cylinder for the label, with an opacity map? And this affects the highlights on the glass… hmm… it shouldn’t.
OH WAIT:
Which max version? Original Max 9 or the service pack?
There was an issue w. the importance propagation and opacity in the original max 9 release… that could perhaps have this “effect”… hmm. It shouldn’t have anything to do with caustics though… hmm…
Hi - thanks for getting back on this. It is a separate cylinder for the label, and it is opacity mapped, but that is done within the sub-materials of a Blend material and it is looking like that Blend mat is the source of the problem.
I have two A&D materials in the Blend, both with opacity maps. Each one has an opacity map of it’s own and each one works just fine if used alone on the cylinder - caustics etc are just fine. If I put them together in a Blend material it works okay for everything BUT caustics - then the opacity maps don’t work and I get that result I posted above.
I am currently trying to stick the Blend mat itself in a “material to shader” and put THAT inside an A&D material’s diffuse colour slot, and then opacity map that final A&D mat. Not sure if it will work yet, but this seems like an awful lot of hoops to jump through through. Is there simpler way to make a mixed material?
Thanks in advance,
b
edit: we’re using the service pack and atm it’s Max 64bit
Unless I’m doing something very wrong, there seems to be a problem with Illumination Glow material. It isn’t seemingly able to actually have final gather affect it’s results. Here is a rectangle with illuminated material attached (in physically correct environment). Glows parameters are 1500cd strength, with D65White color, the image is gammacorrected in Max 2.2 and rendered through photographic exposure control.
Only thing lighting the entire scene is the final gather solution, set to default ‘medium’ parameters. However, bounces (5) do not seem to be affecting the solution, and it is extremely splotchy.
Another test is done with a photometric free area light with the exact same physical properties. Final gathers bounces are taken into account here and all other parameters (exposure and gamma) are identical to the previous render.
I’m not exactly sure if that is intentional or not, but Max demonstration video seemed to imply that object turned into a light source through glow can be used to accurately illuminate the scene.
Of course, there’s a chance that I might be doing something wrong and there’s a misstep in my workflow, any ideas?
And before someone says this, I do know that you cannot expect the same results from both, since glow does not have a direct illumination in it per se, but final gather bounces should at least work no? And the amount of splotches with the two renders that have same finalgather and physical settings is somewhat scary.
Hey how can i make a shader similar to white gold? I’m kinda new to this and all i could get is some kind of bright plastic… i even tried to use the Chrome shader and mod through there but still no go…
Can someone explain what the big deal with white gold that i can’t recreate it?
(Or maybe i’m just a dumbass that’s missing something that’s right in front of me…)
wich is very possible lol. xD
Yes it seems you stumbled twice in a row. The thing is that neither bright plastic nor chrome are any close to white gold. Plastic isn’t since plastic utilizes diffuse color, which white gold itself likely does not. And chrome, since chrome is all about specularity, aka mirror reflections. The ‘key’ is usually glossy reflections and subtle tweaking of reflection colors and brightness. I made a quick test that - while not very close to white gold - is possibly a good starting point for tweaking.
It basically reflects near white (but not full white color), it being glossy reflection around 0.65, reflection itself is full 1.0.
Also, when making a material, don’t forget that especially with metal materials it’s very important for them to reflect something. This test looks very different in an environment with very plain and not contrasting surroundings.
Anyways, this one still needs more tweaking but if that’s anything close to what you’re after then good:
Yep this has always been a problem with cranking up the FG, its same in Max9, its self illumination, not a very nice way of doing it. Autodesk should have added Object lights, photons, area shadows, it would have been great.
The only problem here is of a mis-representation of the intent of the feature on the part of Autodesk.
I pretty much jumped out of my Chair at siggraph when they demonstrated this as a “feature” of teh self-illum/glow of the A&D material.
That is so totally backwards to the design intent. This is not object lighting, never was claimed to be. It is actually primarily intended for the exact opposite, i.e. NON-illuminating objects.
The “illumination” is just FG, i.e. same as any other self-illuminating object (although yes, you can specify it using physical units - fine).
The idea with it is to use the shader for the “visual representation” of a light source, a light source you already have in the scene, probably some photometric light with an IES file.
The problem with the photometric light was that they are invisibile, and restricted to a rectangular shape. That’s fine for illuminating, but what if you want to see the fluorescent tubes properly in your render?
If you tried to make the tubes using any traditional self-illumination technique, they would also illuminate the scene. But since you already have a light, which has the correct value, you don’t want that. You want to “see” them, but not get “light” from them. (Which is why the “Illuminate when using FG” is OFF by default)
That is the intended use of the self-illum feature: To make the “visual representation” geometry, NOT to create the light, just because it is much more efficient to do the light with a “real” light for anything else than a neon tube on a wall.
… thanks for that explanation. that makes things understandable. and on the other hand it saves a lot of time, otherwise spend useless for try and error
