Shader Math

#1

Hi there,

I just bought the mental ray book by Boaz Livny. It’s just great, but I was wonderung if it’s possible to recreate some of his custom Maya and XSI shaders in Max. There is a chapter about creating a custom Fresnel shader using the dot product and a whole lot of vector math. Maya and XSI seem to offer nodes for exactly that purpose. Has Max anything similar? Maybe by using some PlugIn? There must be a way to build complex custom shaders in Max, right? I know people have been complaining about the material editor for a long time now, so what’s the solution? I tested MentalMill, but that’s not really an alternative, since it can only generate hardware shaders, right?

Thanks in advance!

#2

mental ray in 3ds Max 2010 will render mental mill artist edition nodes. All of the default artist edition nodes are compiled as mental ray shaders in 2010. For example, adding a reflection component node to a phenomenon in mental mill will display as a reflection map in the viewport, but will render as ray trace reflection when rendered through mental ray.

-Eric

#3

Thanks Eric!

Still some questions:

I looked into the Artist Edition of Mental Mill. I downloaded the beta Standard Edition last weekend, but deleted it and now they have gone 1.0 and the beta is no longer avaible. If you simply want to use mental mill shaders to work in max is there a huge benefit from having the full standard version?

I’m still trying to figure out a workflow for bringing in my mental mill shaders. I also had to change my systems units symbols to get the shaders to work, but there are still some issues like missing reflection and several error messages saying that some shaders nodes from the demo shaders are not supported. I will work through the mental mill forum to look for some ressources, or maybe some tutorials. However… Would you consider mental mill to be a full replacement for creating materials in the material editor?

Thanks!

#4

The full version allows for added features like writing your own nodes that work in Max and mental ray, has a mental ray preview mode, and other features. This isn’t possible with the Artist Edition. I would go ask on the mental mill forums if you have specific questions.

I’m still trying to figure out a workflow for bringing in my mental mill shaders. I also had to change my systems units symbols to get the shaders to work, but there are still some issues like missing reflection and several error messages saying that some shaders nodes from the demo shaders are not supported.
I don’t think the demo files are Max ready Phenomenon.
However… Would you consider mental mill to be a full replacement for creating materials in the material editor?
No, since mental mill doesn’t support everything in Max, you could do it, but you will lose a lot of the default maps/materials and lose all support for 3rd party mr shaders.

-Eric

#5

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