Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Scooby_Doo on September 12, 2009, 11:24:46 pm
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Finally figured it out, not much tutorial help online, so here's one :P
This was for max 9, but i think 2009 also has this.
1. First make sure you have copies of the textures as either jpg,bmp or tga.
2. Open up the material manager.
3. Select your material
4. Open up the bar called "DirectX Manager"
5. Next to "Enable Plugin Material" change "None" to "Metal Bump 9" and put a checkmark in "Enable Plugin Material"
6. A new bar should appear "DirectX Shader - Metal Bump 9" and automatically open.
7. Texture 1 is the diffuse texture. So simply drag the "M" that's beside the Diffuse texture in the "Blinn Basic Parameters" (This is the one where you assigned the texture to originally) to "Texture 1"'s None entry. Use Instance as it saves memory.
8. Do the same if necessary for the Specular (shine) map.
9. You can do this in one of at least two different ways. Either load each of the bump and normal maps separately, or create instances of the existing ones. The open seperately is pretty straightforward.
a. For the instances open up the Maps page, select the Bump entry (if you don't have a bump/normal map yet, then shaders won't do much help). It should be "Normal Bump".
b. Drag the Normal entry to a spare material slot, choose instance. Repeat for the bumpmap. (You don't need both, but never hurts).
c. Move back up the material hierarchy.
d. Now drag those instances you just map to the Metal Bump 9's Bump normal, bump entries. Make sure there's a checkmark to enable them.
10. If the bumps don't show up well, drag the bump intensity up.
Couple of notes: If you have skylights on your scene, delete them and you must keep the original diffuse/spec/glow/normal map there, as Max doesn't use shaders when rendering or exporting.
Edit: Oh yes, if your using multi-material, each item must have a Metal Bump 9 for it otherwise that section won't display.
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... Or you could just put a diffuse map, shine map and bump map on the material, and not bother with the Direct X shaders.
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HMmm.....
A Brand0X - Scooby Doo collaborative Max tutorial.
That seems like a good idea COUGH COUGH ;)
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A very subtle suggestion, Dekker
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... Or you could just put a diffuse map, shine map and bump map on the material, and not bother with the Direct X shaders.
I've never gotten them to show up in the preview windows before, just the diffuse texture.
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Ah, thought you wanted them for rendering. If that's the case then carry on.
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Yup, in fact I don't think the shader's will even render.
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Hmm, not quite sure. To be honest I haven't used the scanline renderer for anything since I was in high school. Always used a separate rendering package like VRay or FinalRender
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Are there any good freeware renderers out there?
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Not that I'm aware of, but also note I've never actually looked into it either
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Apparently "keykythea" or something like that... one of the formats that Wings3D exports to for renders...
Also, Blender can render.
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Blender comes with a rendering engine, but everyone knows that...
I use POV-Ray (which is free), which AC3D (which is not free) is designed to interface with "out-of-the-box," so to say. I did post a render a while back with the program of a GTB Medusa...
Here's a link:
http://www.povray.org/
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Ultimately, however, most of the good rendering packages can come up with equal quality, where they differ is usually mostly in render time and sacrifices made (usually linked, the more sacrifices the lower the rendering time) and somewhat in realism (though most can come up with nearly realistic images, it differs. TBH though with most you'll never know the difference.
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Max comes with mental ray renderer too.
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I've got vue d'esprit 4 knocking about somewhere. I always liked the quality it produced. . Dunno why.
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Did you try POV-Ray yet, Dekker?
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I've only been in half an hour, but i'm downloading it now :D
Edito'le'grande
Hmmmmmmmmmmm a FREE 3D modeller called Moray from the same site? Intruiging.
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there are a BUNCH of free renderers out there, of varying quality.
Off the top of my head: Yafray, Kerkythea, Sunflow, Lux (or Luxor, or something like that), and Indigo (but that might not be free anymore).
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Are we talking about independent applications or plugins?
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I don't know. . . Can I put POV into max?
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I can't say Dekker. POV-Ray is an independant application as far as I know. It runs with AC3D as that program supports .pov files as the default rendering output.
By the way, did you try Moray? If so, how was it? I've never bothered to try it...
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Surprisingly easy to get into.
Not sure about the file formats though .UDO anyone :wtf:?
No idea how to get my max files into POV ray still. But i believe my benchmark scores are reasonably high (attached)
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I really wish I could help, Dekker...
However, there is a Wiki on the POV-Ray site. After a bit of browsing, I did get a few leads on 3DS Max. As both programs are imaginably fairly widespread, I'd be shocked if there wasn't a Max plug-in to export .pov files.
:eek2: And no... I've never heard of .udo before. I did look at Moray after you mentioned it, and it seemed like a pretty old piece of software. At least by your description it's pretty easy to use!
Finally, bringing the subject of renderer back up again has inspired me to make a better rendition of one of my favorite "old gals":
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