Mental Ray - Shaders

#781

The .MAT file is on page one. Its the first file.

(I thought I’d save you the trouble folical9 - BTW the brick texture is excellent).

bobg

#782

Allright Ive been fiddling with the sss shader some more:

View Skin Test Render

View Internal skin Test Render

View Internal skin Test Render 2

I never believed Max was capable of such coolness!

Oh and trust me you DO want to see all 3 of the movies :wink:

#783

lol, that third video is cool man! great job, what was the render time like?

Jeff

(and thanks bobg…:thumbsup: )

#784

Heya, can someone help me create a material ?

i tried making one myself, but i dont know how to create that blurry reflection in the matererial :expressionless:

#785

Elmar it has been covered already, in the mat file from this thread there are 2 nickel materials, you could also make a basic mat with a metal lume in the reflection slot, just adjust the spread and reflection values.

#786

Why only one thread? Why not complete forum dedicated to mental ray?

regards, rohit

#787

Because, then they should do one for every rendering system.

Well why isn’t there a thread for shading in other rendering systems?
Because the mental ray shaders work different then the shaders of (most) other popular rendering systems (they roughly work like the standard max materials)

#788

Hi, I’ve problem with “F9 brick shader”…Can you take a look at this ?

and .max file :O)

thx…:slight_smile:

p.s. thx bobg :slight_smile:

mac

#789

Finally !!! I spend all the night reading all your coments , watching the tests and making some renders in max with Mr and i want to thank you to Folical and everyone that help in this thread with great info and good examples . Really you can learn a lot of things bout Mr here. Lets keep this up and ill post my tests on the weekend to share with you all the info that i learned in bout 8hrs

Thanks

:thumbsup:

#790

thanks a lot Jeff…

by the way…i turned on Gi for mental ray…but when i rendered with final gather…it said no photon emitter in the scene…how i cure this?

and please please please answer to it!

#791

Hi folical…

I have downloaded the rubber file on the first thread and noticed that its the same as the glass file when i render it. hmmm i wondered if you would not mind adding the rubber file to the thread again so we can check it out. I was also wondering if you could tell me how long the glass ss took to render on your machine

cheers pal

nebille

#792

Geoman: how many lights (and what type) do you have in your scene?

nebille: I can’t find that file (I know I had it at one point in time). Have a look here: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=104578&perpage=15&pagenumber=20

Cabbage created that file and you should be able to contact him and get it. Hey Cabbage, you may want to put that file on the MR-Uploader? If you do, let me know and I will update the link on the first post here.

Jeff

#793

cheers , i found the file with the material … Gonna see if i can recreate the effects that cabbage had… Only way to learn… Other than someone teaching you. Trial and error seem to be the only way i learn anything at the momment

Keep it up guys

#794

Nice thread lads, really informitive. I thought I’d better say thanks for all the pointers I’ve been reading over the past week or so, especially to BigRanS123, since reverse-engineering his skin mat gave me a great big head start in creating my own (especially since I had never used Mental Ray until last weekend, and the documentation that ships with Max is so… well… you know).

I’d love to contribute by posting my resulting mat file back here, but I can’t since a) mine is model-specific and heavily reliant on huge bitmaps (which I obviously can’t post) so it wouldn’t make much sense, and b) it’s a work project so doesn’t even belong to me anyway.

So instead I’ll just tell you that I simplified it quite a bit (fewer shellac levels), added some horribly complicated, masked, nested fall-offs to simulate that peach-fluff/short blonde hair halo you see around the ear and neck in direct sunlight, and integrated the subscatter shader (removing the partivolume shaders at the same time, obviously).

Here’s a wip:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mcfudger/heidwip_1.jpg

1 Skylight + 1 shadowcasting mrArealight,
FG on@ 200-ish samples
Full geometry Shag Hair (so it’s about a bazillion polys :slight_smile: )
I have SSS and the peach fuzz turned off in this render (the peach fuzz because I haven’t finished it yet, the sss because the effect is so subtle, yet the render hit so huge, that I won’t use it for test renders, and I still yet have lots to do)
Rendered in about 14 minutes on a P4 3gig.

I thought you’d appreciate knowing that the effort going into this thread is being put to some real-world use :slight_smile:

Thanks again.

#795

I’m not able to download your file Macrog. However, I’ve added a scene using the brick material to the MR uploader. Here’s the render output (no post adjustements made)

Here’s the file: Download brick scene

Some notes on the material:
To make the edges crisper, decrease the displacement edge length from .75 to .5 or lower (render times will increase). I kinda like the softer look of the setting I used in this file already though.

You can also increase the Max Level from 6 to 7 and it will give less artifact, but again render times will increase.

In the material itself, I also used the brick map texture in the direction strength slot (at a value of 500). If you lower this or take it out completely, then you will have a gap where the displacement meets a corner…try it and see.

Hope that helped.

#796

i am using a skylight with scene environment checked…an HDRI map…final gather on…and when i turn on GI…it says no photon emitters!

#797

Aah… Peachfuzz Iain! Nice to hear someone else is working on the same thing that I am. I’ve been trying to use a falloff shader in the extrusion strenght slot for displacement. But no matter what I do it won’t show up. When I inverse the falloff I get some displacement but it won’t show the other way around. All other maps that I’ve tried work for the displacement but not falloff. Maybe you can’t compute a normal map for a mesh that’s being displaced because then you would get a whole other set of normals after the displacement. Anyone that know why it’s not working for me and maybe even some kind of workaround. (before you ask: I’ve even tried to render a “normal/falloff pass” for my geometry and using that as a screen map for the texture but still no luck). Maybe theres a problem with something else and not the falloff map (possibly me). I’m to tired for this right now, I need to get out and get me some inspiration = :beer:

Peace

#798

Hmm, I’m not sure if skylight will work with GI. Try and make a spotlight and right click it and go to properties then the mental ray tab. Make sure Generate GI is on.

#799

I seem to be missing a file when I try to open up the “.MAT” file.

The error message says:

Missing Dlls

“FileName: mentalray.dlz”
“Class: mr_subScatter”
“SuperClass: 0xC10”

DLL Description
mental ray Renderer (Discreet)

What’s wrong? And how do I fix it?

I can load the “.MAT” file anyway, but I don’t think all the shaders work, because of the error.

#800

Hi everyone,

as mentioned before, great work guys…and a truely great and informative thread!

Thought it would be time starting to contribute a little…

Started working on a Grass material myself. It´s completely procedural and includes the ability to do animated “waving” or “non-vertical” grass. Bowed Grass aint really possible…but hey…it´s a material, not a grass sim plugin ;p

following is a preview screenshot…still beeing worked on. Rendered without shadows for speed reasons. looks better with shadow of course.

Everything is procedural…so if you would be doing actual work with it, you could basically “paint” the grass on a surface.

Geometry used in this test rendering is 2 planes

So far and have fun. Comments and crits most welcome of course!

Thorsten