[Jay325]

For starters I know my renders need a LOT of tlc so criticism is more than appreciated. My point for this post however is because I can't for the life of me figure out why the background is always grey when the material I choose is usually and in this case white???? I can never get a white ground plane...ever? Is this something that is supposed to be done in photoshop and can not be achieved in the rendering???


Thanks

[Half Life]

Can you share the material?

Best,
Jason.

[Jay325]

I dont know how to attach the zipped file so here is the link to the material. If this does not work let me know.

http://resources.maxwellrender.com/sear ... v2=0&tipo=

Thanks for the help Jason

[Half Life]

That is an old way of making that type of material and one of the drawbacks is that the color always turns grey.

Here's a better version -- I used displacement because it will look better for a closeup shot like you have (although it will take longer).

The scale is set to repeat the texture every .5 meters -- which means this is a "realscale" material... as such it should be applied to a groundplane with a 1m x 1m projector (Normalized UVs in Maxwell Studio).

If you have any questions let me know -- and I think we'd all like to see the render when it's done

Best,
Jason.

[Jay325]

LOL thanks Jason I'll give that material a try tonight. I literally just laughed out loud after reading your post. Do I have any questions? lmao where would I begin?

I guess for starters is there a place I can learn to make materials the proper way? And how do I know if a material is created in the proper way or not when taking materials from there since I dont know how to create them myself? Is the maxwell render 2 training cd a current learning tool because that's what I have, and have been TRYING to learn about maxwell from.

Life was so much simpler as a grunt Point, shoot, drink eat...in that order..

Thanks for all your help!!
Jay

[Half Life]

Well, it's mostly current -- obviously it predates the introduction of aspects like FIRE, HDR Light Studio Integration, pretesselated Displacement, etc... but mostly the basics haven't changed much.

The first 6 hours (which deals with Materials) are still pretty much spot on.

Materials are a very complex topic and there is certainly no proper way -- there are just ways that have different advantages and disadvantages.

For instance the material I gave you has some disadvantages too -- it uses additive blending mode which can be a problem and it uses displacement which can slow things down considerably. But considering your scene I felt they were the right decisions.

I suppose one of the hardest areas for people to grasp are the needs of the various texture slots in MXED -- since many of them deal with greyscale images, but they mean different things to each... I have proposed a pure "Texturing and Material making" course for Maxwell to VTC but I don't think they are sold on the idea since I don't know if they think the audience is there.

It took me about a year of study and experimentation to really get the feel for Maxwell -- and I still learn new stuff often... so just keep at it and ask questions when you get stumped. We're here to help.

Best,
Jason.

[Mihai]

Just a note but the displacement set to adaptive mode will take much longer to clear than just using a normal map in the bump. This leather doesn't show heavy displacement that can't be faked in this case with a normal map, even in a close up.

I converted the bump into a normal map using nDo2 (http://quixel.se), highly recommended for creating normal maps in Photoshop.



Just load it in the bump channel, then don't forget to click the little icon next to the texture chip to let Maxwell know you've loaded a normal map. The bump value will then jump to 100 - that's normal, you can leave it at that, or lower it if you want less of a bump effect.

I'd recommend just starting to look through the online docs and tutorials:
http://support.nextlimit.com/category/maxwell

[Half Life]

You know Mihai, I've often wondered why Maxwell does not just convert a bump map into a normal map internally since the quality of output is much better and as you say this can be done with external apps.

I'm not the biggest fan of bump and normal mapping in general as I prefer displacement -- I'm just not a fan of "faking" lighting... but if you have to choose, normal maps do work better.

Best,
Jason.

[Mihai]

Well to 'just convert them' would be an application in itself - you need a lot of options and fine tuning when converting from an image - be it b/w (a bump) or color.

[Jay325]

The scale is set to repeat the texture every .5 meters -- which means this is a "realscale" material... as such it should be applied to a groundplane with a 1m x 1m projector (Normalized UVs in Maxwell Studio).

Jason I can't seem to use your material? I have it on the desktop in a folder and after selecting it from within the material browser the following pops up.

if I select "keep as mxm reference" and apply it to a 1x1 ground plane from the library the ground plane disappears and if I hit render anyway this is what I get
and if I click on "embed in scene" and drag and drop the material on the plane, this is what I get

so I click on "yes to all" and this is the 2 min render I get

(STILL GREY and there is no texturing to be seen on the ground??)

Here is a quick pic of the scene.

I've got to say, this program is really pissing me off :/ It takes days and I'm sure weeks in some cases to get answers trying to learn this way, I feel as though if someone was showing me this I would have this down but instead I've got to cut and paste pictures to illustrate my problems rather than having a "tech support" of sorts to turn to! Why do they not offer classes for this program it's not like it's easy!!? Next limit gets a 10 of 10 for producing great software and about a 3 of 10 for supporting the learning curve...

[Mihai]

About referenced materials:
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... +Materials

About using Real Scale materials:
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... +in+Studio

Material FAQ about missing textures (FAQ nr 1)
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/kn ... erials+FAQ

Basically that material is not able to find the textures it's using, maybe because you put the mxm on your desktop and in that case it can't find the textures in the 'textures' folder that should also be on your desktop. Easiest way is to just put that mxm in the 'textures' folder and Studio will automatically look for textures in the same folder as the MXM. There's more info on that FAQ page.

A tip, if your object is so small, you can make that plane a lot smaller - and bring the emitters closer too, it will make nicer contrast.

I'm not sure if you realize how much you would have had to read and learn in other renderers to even get close to what you are rendering already. Before you even got to materials you would have to read pages and pages of what obscure render settings do. There is always a learning curve but at least have a look through the manual first, it's not THAT long and you can quickly search for info relevant to what you're doing at the moment.

[Half Life]

Well to 'just convert them' would be an application in itself - you need a lot of options and fine tuning when converting from an image - be it b/w (a bump) or color.

I don't know, I've used about a half dozen apps to make normal maps and most of the options have to do with the normal output format -- which if it was internal you would control.

The bump intensity setting could be easily adapted to the normal scale... I mean after all I'm not suggesting you let users output normal maps from Maxwell -- just convert the bump to normal (which is a pretty straight forward thing) internally at render time for better results.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Jason I can't seem to use your material?

The links above are all useful -- and I will say this is a very common problem (linking textures) which as you build up experience you don't even notice... I had the same issue when I download the texture from the Maxwell resources website (missing texture popup).

The easiest solution is simply to drop the textures into the same folder as the MXM -- which isn't always possible with large MXM libraries due to conflicting texture names.

I always open a newly downloaded MXM in MXED and save it back out from there just to update the paths to my machine(s).


As far as the plane UV's:

UV's are a old but still advanced issue for 3D artists -- one which can cause alot of confusion even for otherwise advanced users. This is not really a Maxwell issue as it is not really much better in many other applications. Unfortunately UV's are a necessary evil we have to deal with to get the results we want.

The function of UV's is to control how 2D textures are mapped to 3D surfaces... think of it like wrapping Christmas presents. The Geometry is the present and the texture used in the material is the wrapping paper. Obviously not everything is a simple shape and some things are going to be easier (and better looking) to wrap than others.

Maxwell Studio has a semi-complex UV control system, which if you invest time into mastering you can use to great effect for most objects (complex organic shapes like people need external software). As part of that system they have the option of using RealScale...

To use RealScale (which is a UV control simplification system for Maxwell) you need to set the UV projector of the relevant object (in this case a plane) to "Normalize". I tend to use the "cubic" UV type since it is the least "fiddly" and will work on almost any object pretty well.

So the workflow would go like this:

1. Apply the material to the plane.
2. Select the plane from the objects list.
3. Go to the Objects Parameters panel, to the UV Sets subheading.
4. Set the type for Cubic.
5. Click the Normalize button.

From this point you can forget about UV's. If you need to change the scale of the texture tiling, you do so directly inside the material via the Texture Picker by changing the X and Y tiling scale (in meters) -- in this case you would have to modify 5 textures:

Base layer:
Reflectance 0
Reflectance 90
Displacement

Specular layer:
Layer opacity
Roughness

Now that may sound like alot of manual work, but the advantage is you can pretty much avoid dealing with UV editing altogether.

Bear in mind there are a couple of ways to deal with the UV/texture tiling issue -- Real Scale is just one of them, but it's the one that allows you to understand the least about UV's and still have good control over the results.

Best,
Jason.

[Chris Krüger]

Jay325: Buy this video training: http://www.vtc.com/products/Maxwell-Ren ... orials.htm It's really good and you will learn the basics ++ I've learned a LOT from it.

Cheers,

Chris

[Chris Krüger]

I have proposed a pure "Texturing and Material making" course for Maxwell to VTC but I don't think they are sold on the idea since I don't know if they think the audience is there.

I would def buy it, and i think many other users would to.