Jeff Patton JeffPatton Location: Lexington, USA Language(s):
English Member Since: August 2002 Last Updated: 29 June 2008 Portfolio Views: 484640 Chosen as Favorite: 303
Just a guess, but it sounds like you may be trying to use a save final gather map or possibly ambient occlusion in your tests. I tried a simple setup as you describe with using the cutout map of an A&D material and encountered no problems: http://jeffpatton.net/Temp/visibility_test.mov
Final Gather is view dependent, so if anything other than your camera moves (or changes), you should calculate final gather each frame instead of using a saved final gather map.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the reply re: converting your max mr materials for maya use. I think when I have some spare time I'll try and manually recreate your mia shaders in maya and see how viable/quick that is. I'll let you know if I make any progress.
The xml way sounds interesting but I have zero scripting skill so that's a non-starter for me.
thanks for sharing your mentalray expertise. i'm not sure if it's kosher to ask random questions here, but it seems fruitful given the past entries.
i'm brand new to mr, and i'm getting some odd hangs when working with materials. when mr is rendering the mat editor, switching between materials takes significantly longer, and specifically, whenever there is a blend or multi-sub in the editor each click takes a good 10-15 seconds. this behavior is apparent in both max9 and max10 (2008).. is this common? are there any solutions or workarounds?
I don't have an official explanation as to why a multisub or blend material would slow down the material editor. I guess if they included multiple raytraced sub-materials then it would simply take a little longer for mental ray to render those preview spheres in the material editor...beyond that, I don't know.
At any rate, I'd think enabling the manual update switch on the material editor would speed things up again since you'd only refresh the material preview when you wanted/needed to.
OMG, you are disgustingly brilliant! Very realistic models. Thanks for your help on my mentalray problem. I'm certain it's one of the things you mentioned.
the "tutorial" you gave about using sky bitmaps on an inverted sphere works fine with p/graphic exposure, only problem i'm having now is that my mental ray sun is having no effect at all
i have followed tutorial except for adjusting to p/graphic exposure
i think i'm missing something really small (or maybe not)
