Maxwell Render | Official public forum

As I finally get around to learning Allegorithmic Substance Painter I wonder if this idea might have more merit:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 0&p=394251

You're probably referring to this "PBR" workflow, where you can choose if a material behaves like a plastic or a metal and you can map different parts of it? For example plastic-like paint, that's chipped away to reveal metal underneath?

First it's important to keep in mind that the "metallic map" you get from these PBR workflows will almost always be either completely white or completely black - simply because it makes no sense to make a material that's partly metal or partly plastic.

Since in Maxwell, as you lower the roughness, the material behaves like a metal, to mimic the PBR workflow you have to simply separate out the plastic parts in one Layer (or more), set it to Additive, and one Layer (or more) that holds the metallic BSDFs. Then simply use the Metallic map you get from Substance painter to weight the additive layers. I was planning to show this in more detail in a tutorial for taking a PBR material from 3D Coat and replicating it in Maxwell, but essentially the additive layer approach is what you have to do.

One aspect of it that interests me is that no matter how complex or tall your layer stack becomes the final material is the same simple, optimal set of parameters and maps. It seems like you can be inefficient with your material design without penalty. The stack gets flattened before rendering.

I'm not sure that's what happens - there is a small penalty the more BSDFs and Layers which need to be evaluated.

In Substances?

I thought you ment the Maxwell materials Well yes, the whole graph is output to a bitmap in the end. But you can't control all material parameters with bitmaps, in any renderers material system. Would be very awkward.

Why not ? It would be actually quite convenient to have an option to control some parameters with bitmaps. As bitmaps are either rub value or just black and white.
And you guys probably have dealt with "packed" textures. Where you pack, say, meatless, ambient occlusion and roughness map into one texture. Each channel get's a greyscale map - and you'll just split it later on in material creation software (UE4, hyper shade, etc) - This way you can cut the amount of textures needed for the render. Especially if we're talking 8k

But for that to work we definitely need a node based system. Which ould be super ace to get. Essentially, I think this is the only thing that separates Maxwell render from big-ass production houses.

Sorry, for going a bit off topic, but .. I just did some test with Substance Painter and Maxwell render today .. might post my results in WIP forum - and I would definitely would love to hear your opinions on what could / should be improved .. as I mainly developed that workflow from scratch for myself - just did what is logical - and yup - ended up splitting everything per material: metal // paint // dust

Cheers,
Tim.

P.S. - NODES !! we need NODES