Maxwell Render

Kurt: Thanks for your material, i been dissecting it today and your approach differs quite a bit from mine, it's very interesting to see. You seem to know what you're doing directly without testing anything from what i can see. It's so clean, crisp and sharp. Very well done material i'm gonna try to learn as much as i can from this one.

About that snow material, i can't agree that it's "perfect". It looks ok but it can look better and more realistic and i know you and many others on this forum are all very capable of reproducing a better looking one. That's what i'm waiting for now, to see someone upload a better snow to the MXM Gallery, when i see that then i can upload mine again.

Yes some of my materials are missing from the MXM Gallery, but most of them been reposted here on the forum so people can still download them if they wanna play with them. I'm not holding anything i created back, everything is shared on the forum.

/ Max

In this case I tried to keep it simple, and I did not have to do much testing. But thats not always the case. I've spent a lot of time testing, and I've been thinking of reopen the "TestLab" to make some more experimental stuff...

Please do reopen your Testlab, it was a great success back then and i'm sure it'll be a even greater success now when you learnt more and gained more experience since last time you posted anything there. and it's a good source of inspiration for the rest of us.

/ Max

Kurt: I downloaded your rope material so I could have a look and see how you did it....I am still completely boggled.

I had a look at your textures, bump and displacement and think that I get how you put them together into your finished material but holy smokes I would never have known where to start. I would never have guessed that those maps would produce the cable rope render that you posted.

I have been fiddling around with your rope material and am having some difficulty with scaling issues. I am working in jewellery scale with the cable so I have been trying to scale the rope material down to the mm level without success.

Do you folks have any suggestions for taking this down in scale? I have played with the tiling and displacement but when I do that the rotation of the cable gets thrown off, it straightens out so that there is almost no twist in the cable. And when I reduce the displacement I get triangular kinks in the cable.

Any ideas would be very much welcomed. Thanks again in advance!!!!
Cary

hi caryjames!
It should not be any problem to take this down in scale, as long as you take care of the displacement values and tile the UV correctly. I don't know what modeling program you are using, but from the description of your problem (texture straightens out) this sounds like a problem that could be fixed in the Material editor simply by editing the x/y tiling.
To start with you could try:
Tile X= 1
Tile Y= 10
Just remember that you have to edit the values for ALL textures used in the MXM - they all must have the same tiling values! You might end up using totally other values than what I suggested above, but the only way to figure out is making some test and look at the preview. It all depends on your models U/V.

About the triangle problems: there are two ways to fix this: increase the precision value (=long rendering times), or subdivide the surface (faster rendering, more triangles)
Post some screenshots or test renderings, and I might be able to give you more useful advices...

Cary, the whitest point on the texture map, will be the upper limit set in the displacement layer.

So for a 2mm thick object, the upper limit would be 0.2 with real units(cm) checked. You'll also need to set the offset to 0.000.

That will give 2mm of displacement on your 2mm thick chain, which would give a rendered chain 4mm thick with displacement.

If the offset is set to 0.5 and you have a displacement value greater than the thickness of the object, the displacement will invert the object's surface for the values less than 50% grey on the texture.
Using the upper limit of 2cm and a 0.5 offset on your 2mm chain , will produce inverted displacement of 1cm and correct displacement of 1cm, which is obviously too great for a 2mm thick object..

Also it sounds like your chain object needs a few more polygons and an increased smoothing angle of 120' or more.

Hope this helps,

Tim.

_________________
http://emp3d.com
-------------------------------------
Next Limit Certified Training Centre for Maxwell Render.
Maxwell Render Training & consultancy. A-Team tester.

0.002 or 0.2?.
1.00 = 1 cm / 0.1= 1 mm ? with real units checked

_________________
En la vida solo hay dos cosas seguras: la muerte y los impuestos.
gallery: viewtopic.php?t=13820
http://www.foto-viva.es/

THANKS everyone!! I will give those suggestions a whirl tonight and see how it goes. I will post some screen shots either way.
Cary

I uploaded my steel rope to the MXM gallery. Its not yet accepted by the NL team, but it can be found here: http://mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com/news_scripts.php#page=1&mode=0&id=3968

O.K. so I obviously do not know what the hell I am doing .......!

Can someone enlighten me as to where I am going wrong. Sorry to be so needy but textures in general are really new to me. Just for reference the object is a 2mm diameter rod that I modelled in Rhino. I have the texture projection set to Cylindrical.

1) Tile X = 1
Tile Y = 10
Displacement = 0.002
Offset = 0
Precision = 120



2) Tile X = 0.5
Tile Y = 5.0
Same displacement, offset, and precision as above



3) Tile X = 2
Tile Y = 5.0
Same displacement, offset, and precision as above



4) Tile X = 1
Tile Y = 5.0
Same displacement, offset, and precision as above



Again a super LARGE thanks to everyone in advance
Cary

could you also show the view of the rino viewport? once shaded and once the render view, with the displacement texture activated

you might also try very different values, like X=5 and Y=200, but it looks to me that in this it might be easier to fix the UV in your modeling app.

About displacement values: make sure that "real scale" is checked for ALL texture maps in the MXM, and the offset value you should use is something in the area 0.05 ~ 0.1, not 0.001

Yes sorry for the confusion. My 0.002 figure was a typo. This should be 0.2 for mm.

Most of the numeric boxes are in meters, displacement is in cm, which is why I wrote 0.002.

Sorry, have edited my post above.

Tim.

_________________
http://emp3d.com
-------------------------------------
Next Limit Certified Training Centre for Maxwell Render.
Maxwell Render Training & consultancy. A-Team tester.

_________________
En la vida solo hay dos cosas seguras: la muerte y los impuestos.
gallery: viewtopic.php?t=13820
http://www.foto-viva.es/

Kurt, is it ok with you if i convert your excellent steelcable material to the "other" competitor engine starting with an F ? i will ofcourse give you full credits for it.

/ Max