mapping help

[romullus]

Sorry, i don't have much time to decipher your scene at the moment, i just took brief glimpse at it and noticed that your label mask is set to 2nd map channel, but your bottle has only one map channel, so the label is unmapped and can't work correctly. You need either set the texture to the channel that exists (channel 1 in your case), or create 2nd map channel on the bottle. Hope that helps.

[Erich]

Sorry, i don't have much time to decipher your scene at the moment, i just took brief glimpse at it and noticed that your label mask is set to 2nd map channel, but your bottle has only one map channel, so the label is unmapped and can't work correctly. You need either set the texture to the channel that exists (channel 1 in your case), or create 2nd map channel on the bottle. Hope that helps.

Hey Romullus. I completely understand that you have little time to devout to my situation, but I so appreciate any time you are able to provide. Thank you so very much! :)

Thanks for letting me know about the map channels. I did not know about that. So I think what you are saying I need to do, is to select the polygons on the bottle where the label is to be located and assign them a map channel of 2. I tried to do that, but for some reason, I cannot see the displacement mapping in the 3ds max viewport. I need to see the material in the viewport to be able to select the correct polygons for the label. I have tried to turn on both "Shaded materials with maps" and Realistic Materials with Maps" but neither of these show anything at all. I also have turned on "Show shaded materials in viewport" in the material editor but that didn't help either. I don't know if this is a 3ds Max problem or a Corona problem.

If you have any thoughts about this, I would greatly appreciate your help once again.

[romullus]

I think you might be confusing map channels with material IDs. They are not the same! I think you're not seeing anything in the viewport because your bottle has no map 2 channel. Simply add another UVW map modifier and set its channel to 2, then you start seeing something and adjust things as you need.

[romullus]

Material IDs can be really useful in your scene too, but first you need to address map channel issue, otherwise you will not be able to advance anywhere.

[Erich]

I think you might be confusing map channels with material IDs. They are not the same! I think you're not seeing anything in the viewport because your bottle has no map 2 channel. Simply add another UVW map modifier and set its channel to 2, then you start seeing something and adjust things as you need.

Hey Romullus. Thanks for clarifying that. I added another UVW map and set the Map channel to 2, but I am still not seeing any materials in the viewport. I have attached a screenshot....

[Erich]

Hey Romullus. I am able to see the maps in the viewport now. I had to turn on "Show shaded materials in viewport" in the material editor once again (initially, I assumed it was still on, but when I checked it again, it was turned off).

But one thing I am noticing is when I activate "Show shaded materials in viewport" in the material editor, for a specific material (by selecting the material and clicking the button), then select another material, and then go back to the first material, the button has switched back to off! It seems like it doesn't stay enabled after I click on something else. Is this normal behavior, or is there a way to keep it on?

[romullus]

Should not happen, but it's 3ds Max - expect unexpected :]

[romullus]

So i had some spare time to mess with your scene. I moved my edits to separate layer, so you can switch it on and off and see how it compares to the original. I tried to add the names to the changes i've made, so that it would be easier for you to understand everything. You'll notice that the look has changed significantly, this is mostly due to the fact that i removed knurling where it technically shouldn't be. If you prefer the old look, you can go to the bottle's edit poly modifier and change material IDs for the inside of the bottle from 1 to 2 (or vice versa, i can't remember now what is what :]).

BTW, the issue with not displaying textures was with your viewport setup and the issue with the label opacity texture not working was in Corona bitmap - for some reason it does not handle correctly images with alpha. I would recommend to refrain from using textures with alpha, unless you really need it and you know what you're doing.

[Erich]

So i had some spare time to mess with your scene. I moved my edits to separate layer, so you can switch it on and off and see how it compares to the original. I tried to add the names to the changes i've made, so that it would be easier for you to understand everything. You'll notice that the look has changed significantly, this is mostly due to the fact that i removed knurling where it technically shouldn't be. If you prefer the old look, you can go to the bottle's edit poly modifier and change material IDs for the inside of the bottle from 1 to 2 (or vice versa, i can't remember now what is what :]).

BTW, the issue with not displaying textures was with your viewport setup and the issue with the label opacity texture not working was in Corona bitmap - for some reason it does not handle correctly images with alpha. I would recommend to refrain from using textures with alpha, unless you really need it and you know what you're doing.

Hi Romullus. I have to say WOW! Thank you so much for all that work you put into this. I would never have thought about many of the things you added (composite maps, gradient ramps, etc.) But your results are suburb! I will need to take some time and thoroughly study what you did and why, but I so appreciate all that you have done.

There is, at the moment, one thing I don't understand in your setup. In the modifier panel, there is something called "transform gold text" and "transform cut-out". what are these doing exactly? Also if I search for that modifier in the modifier list, I cannot find it. Is it a 3rd party plugin? If so, where can I get it?

Thanks again. You really went above and beyond what I was hoping for in your efforts to help me out with this.

I really wish there were more tutorials available online that covered this kind of work. I know corona is mainly used for Archvis, but surely there are others using it for Product Visualization. I am hoping the team at Corona, and others,  will begin to include these kind of use cases in the future.

[romullus]

I'm glad to hear that you find my effort useful :]

There is, at the moment, one thing I don't understand in your setup. In the modifier panel, there is something called "transform gold text" and "transform cut-out". what are these doing exactly? Also if I search for that modifier in the modifier list, I cannot find it. Is it a 3rd party plugin? If so, where can I get it?

Those are standard 3ds Max UVW xform modifiers, i just renamed them to inform you what's their purpose (it didn't help though ;]). They're there so you could procedurally adjust size and location of label and its graphics. I think i also instanced one of them to the bottle object, so if you adjust the label, bottle's displacement should follow along. P.S. you can rename any modifier in the stack by right clicking on it - sometimes it's useful to help you keep track in a bigger scene, especially if you know that you'll have to come back to it sometime in the future.

Label mesh uses live boolean, so be careful if you'll want to move the bottle in your scene, make sure to also move hidden "cutter" object, or better yet just collapse boolean modifier - it's not needed for your scene, i added it just to show how the scene can be made a bit more procedural.

Couple things i forgot to mention in my previous message - i noticed that your bottle's walls are unrealistically thin. I'd suggest to make them thicker if you want to get more realistic result. Also for glass with varying thickness you almost always want to use absorption. It's turned on in the new glass material, you can turn it on and off and observe how it changes the look. And don't be afraid to experiment with absorption colour and thickness - i just entered quite random values, i'm sure you'll be able to achieve even better results by experimenting with those two values.

And finally - your liquid was open mesh, that's a big no no for any material that has non zero refraction or volumetrics. I fixed this, but try to keep this in mind for the future.

[Erich]

I'm glad to hear that you find my effort useful :]

There is, at the moment, one thing I don't understand in your setup. In the modifier panel, there is something called "transform gold text" and "transform cut-out". what are these doing exactly? Also if I search for that modifier in the modifier list, I cannot find it. Is it a 3rd party plugin? If so, where can I get it?

Those are standard 3ds Max UVW xform modifiers, i just renamed them to inform you what's their purpose (it didn't help though ;]). They're there so you could procedurally adjust size and location of label and its graphics. I think i also instanced one of them to the bottle object, so if you adjust the label, bottle's displacement should follow along. P.S. you can rename any modifier in the stack by right clicking on it - sometimes it's useful to help you keep track in a bigger scene, especially if you know that you'll have to come back to it sometime in the future.

Label mesh uses live boolean, so be careful if you'll want to move the bottle in your scene, make sure to also move hidden "cutter" object, or better yet just collapse boolean modifier - it's not needed for your scene, i added it just to show how the scene can be made a bit more procedural.

Couple things i forgot to mention in my previous message - i noticed that your bottle's walls are unrealistically thin. I'd suggest to make them thicker if you want to get more realistic result. Also for glass with varying thickness you almost always want to use absorption. It's turned on in the new glass material, you can turn it on and off and observe how it changes the look. And don't be afraid to experiment with absorption colour and thickness - i just entered quite random values, i'm sure you'll be able to achieve even better results by experimenting with those two values.

And finally - your liquid was open mesh, that's a big no no for any material that has non zero refraction or volumetrics. I fixed this, but try to keep this in mind for the future.

Hey Romullus. Thank you for that extra feedback and info. I really appreciate it. I wil definitely look into your suggestions. Cheers. :)

[Erich]

Hi Romullus. I am still going over your material setup - there is a lot of things in there to digest!. I was wondering how were you able to stop the black label from reflecting in the liquid object and also how you were able to make the displacement only affect the outside of the glass?

[romullus]

I was wondering how were you able to stop the black label from reflecting in the liquid object

I didn't do anything special about that, i'm sure the label is actually reflecting, like it would naturally do, but since the setup does not include any non-physical hacks, everything just looks normal and plausible.

how you were able to make the displacement only affect the outside of the glass?

It's combination of material ID and Corona multi-map. Polygons of the bottle has two different material IDs assigned to them - ID1 for polygons that should have knurling and ID2 for polygons that shouldn't have it. On material side, it's Corona multi-map that's defining which ID will have knurling and which will have 0 displacement. Hope that makes sense.

[Erich]

It's combination of material ID and Corona multi-map. Polygons of the bottle has two different material IDs assigned to them - ID1 for polygons that should have knurling and ID2 for polygons that shouldn't have it. On material side, it's Corona multi-map that's defining which ID will have knurling and which will have 0 displacement. Hope that makes sense.

Hey Romullus. I was able to figure it out based on your description. Thank you once again from your very detailed help. I have learned a lot from you in this project. One thing I am realizing is that some of the effects you created using Corona nodes could also be done just in Photoshop. For example, you used gradient ramps to hide parts of the displacement texture. I think I could do the same thing just using photoshop and hiding the areas that I don't want to be displaced by covering those areas of the displacement texture with black in Photoshop. I wonder if just using photoshop for these effects might be a lot easier to achieve and allow for greater flexibility?

[romullus]

Well of course you can author your textures in photoshop or wherever else and if you find it to be a lot easier and more flexible, then go for it. I see the situation completely opposite from you, for me procedural building of texture in 3ds Max is way more flexible and very often much faster too. If i need to adjust something, most of the time it's just a matter of moving a slider or two, or entering different numeric value instead of rebuilding texture from scratch in photoshop. And let's not forget memory savings - according to Corona report your bespoke texture takes 110 MB of RAM and my tiling texture is taking just a 770 kB (in fact i could've easily replace it with gradient ramp, so my memory footprint could have been zero). One more thing - if you would need to use this texture on different size or shape bottle, you most likely would have to rebuilt it from scratch, while with my approach, it's just a matter of adjusting some parameters and tiling, which all can be done with Corona IR running and having clear visual guidance.

I'm not forcing you to adopt my workflows, if you're more comfortable with your way of doing things, then by all means do it the way you like it and ignore my setup. After all there's many ways of doing the same thing in 3ds Max and everyone is free to chose what works for them ;]