thanks drew I appreciate it very very much. Wow there’s so much stuff to wrap my brain around in this forum…wish I could contribute but until I get through the basics and intermediate MR stuff I’m afraid I may not be contributing to the thread much.
spiral
“Overthinking, overanylizing separates the mind from the body.”
-Maynard James Keenan (Tool)
Here’s a quick hair test. It’s based on a standard material (totally transparant). I used a cellular map for displacement and parti-volume for the color. This is a low detail version. I can make it thicker (which looked alot better), but the render time goes through the roof…and it crashed before it completed with an “out of memory” error. :hmm:
alright ive been messing around with this mental ray shit lately but ive been having trouble acheiving the effect that i want, i downloaded the mr files that folical put up to supposed unhide all of those shaders but now i get an error screen when max starts but what i want to know is what makes that glowing effect in the windows of this shot? its the light-me test scene i also downloaded from this thread, ive been trying to put the glare lume shader in some camera slot in the rener window but it does nothing. could it be the error causing this to not work?
p.s. i changed the camera angle of course…
[EDIT] o the error message is a mental ray error, i dont remember what it said, it had a bunch of stuff about files, but even when i put my back up files back it still gave me the error
what i want to know is what makes that glowing effect in the windows of this shot?
Glare (lume). It’s a camera shader (output) to be exact.
If your using the glare (lume) shader in a new scene you must adjust the quality before it will be rendered. It defaults to 2, increase it to 3 and then adjust the spread to suit your needs.
I saw a model with glare applied to the camera…of a statue or something. Are the specular highlights that are a little brighter done by the glare effect on the camera?
Sounds dumb but what the hell is the DGS all about. It says in the max reference that to turn the shinyness to black that it will not reflect the outside surroundings. Yet I do so and it still does.
One more question: I find it strange that you cannot apply negative output information while MR is the active renderer. Yeah sure you can put an ouput map in it then put in your bump, but when your pushing 25 materials in a multisub and each material has composite–>mask/base texture–>map/alpha, it seems a little redundant and time wasted when the roll out is right there. Switching the color swatches on say a cellular white/black black/white doesn’t work either. Is there an explanation for this?
spiral
yeah ok well i did all of that only there still isnt anything, im pretty sure its the error thats causing this since the last time i rendered a picture that had the glowing effect was before i messed around with the files i downloaded from this thread, from you folical, heres a screen of the error message
sry, its a little fuzzy…
StoneR, not sure why your getting those errors. Others have used those files I shared and experienced no problems.
My advice would be to backup your materials, scenes, etc. then completely uninstall 3ds max (not a repair from cd). Remove the folders that the uninstall leaves behind and then re-install. That will get you back to original.
Originally posted by spiralof5
[B]
…Sounds dumb but what the hell is the DGS all about. It says in the max reference that to turn the shinyness to black that it will not reflect the outside surroundings. Yet I do so and it still does.
spiral [/B]
DGS == diffuse/glossy/specular reflection. All the light you see is reflected it’s just a matter of how directional that reflection is. Think of DGS as a gradual change from very dull reflection to perfect directional. Glossy is somewhere in the middle and its computed by sampling a bunch of directions around the perfect reflection direction. The D/diffuse reflection is usually sort of faked mathematically speaking and isn’t effected by the the objects surrounding it except directly by lights. In that sense the Dirtmap shader is a more correct diffuse shader which is why you do the tricks I illustrated in the dirtmap example I posted earlier.
-Drew
stoneR - before a complete re-install, if you can, just get a clean copy of the 3dsmax6\mentalray\include*.mi files.
-Drew
even when i put my back up files back it still gave me the error
I assume his backup files were the originals before modification. Thats why I said the full uninstall / reinstall. Been there done that and the only way I could get mine working again was a fresh install.
what light are you guys using to get these shaders to show properly cuz when i render almost all of them render a shiny black
Ok that furball looks very good!
So parti volume eh? Ok lets go for that one…
Experimenting … yep, nuttin…
U need GI for that, right? And it goes on the volume slot, yes?
Still no valid results …:banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
U said u use partivolume for the color … not the opacity?
Cos my main problem is, i just can’t get any opacity to work on top of displacement … a sphere, for instance, with a fallof on opacity, will render fine on the sphere surface, but the peeks generated by the disp will remain unafected by opacity …
Heeeeeeeeelp!
hi,
i finally found a good free web pages site (thx evermotion), and i registered. I loaded 4 simple images: 2 with FR and 2 simbiont mats. Can u see thise images? I’m new to those web procedures, so i dunno if i did right or not.
THX folical9 for the great helps u give in this shader post.
Cu soon
AsDsA
:wavey:
the hair’s cool…
by the way…can i know how is that glare effect done like the one in stoneR 's picture?
Wow, I didn’t know your could do fur with MR. But I wonder if it is any quicker or more controllable then Shag or Shave&Haircut? That render time is long even with a small 320x240 render.
Well, it’s not that u can DO fur with MR … 
unfortunately!
Just rattling mr cage to see what comes out lol!
Still, as far as i have experimented, render times are prohibitive, and of course there is no proper control as for real fur simulation.
Folical9, the parti-volume thing, well, besides not generating alpha, seems not to support objects inside/underneath the mesh to wich it is applied … er … i hope that sentence was understandable.:hmm:
Begining to think this fur stuff is not a good idea after all :banghead:. As i see it, we’ll only get better results by brute processing force, that is, upping the sampling, upping the settings, upping the displacement map, UPPING THE RENDERTIMES!
Still i’ll stick to it just a bit more.
Oh, so anyone knows if u can use opacity, in the opacity slot, and make it affect the displacement too? Cos as i tested it, it affects the original surface fine, but the displaced part still remains 100% opaque.:wip:
Greets and thanx to all!
Hair/fur:
I think you can use shag hair with mental ray if you change the hair to actual geometry? I bet that would really use a systems resources though? Can anyone verify (I don’t own shag…yet)
I happened upon a pretty nice website for creating pologynol hair…Its in lightwave but there’s no reason it can’t be done in max…the best part about it is that it can probably be controlled by Reactor’s cloth sim so that you don’t have to animate it (if your good with reactor too).:buttrock:
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/
I know this doesn’t have anything to do with MR so sorry. But a lot of people asking questions about hair and MR, this is pretty good stuff.
spiralo
does mr work with clothsim? if so then possibly you could turn your shaghair into a clothsim instead and then render, might reduce the use of resources compared to changing to geometry. got me interested though folical9
