Messages

1516

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-23, 15:17:05 »

Not sure what you mean... I wasn't aware there's another change in materials and we need to set 'legacy mode' to off again with the newer builds. Or did I misunderstand?

FYI, daily '2015-06-20 1.1 legacy hotfix' loads these in 'off' state, just like they were saved back then.

Also, saving a file with the latest daily and re-opening it warns me about 'Obsolete data format found...' as if the file was saved in an earlier version of max. Where does that come from?

1517

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-23, 14:42:09 »

It seems all these newer builds load the switch with 'on' state:

2015-07-17
2015-07-21
2015-07-22

I'll test now which of dailies manages to load them correctly, or if it wasn't just saving with the file. Will post when I know more.

This is a huge mess. I'll need to roll back all the files from the last days where I've already used the new sun.

1518

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-23, 14:22:01 »

DailyBuild Jul 17 2015 - max 2016

It seems like this daily build messes up the 'legacy mode' switch in materials. Scenes where I have set this to 'off' now load with it enabled.
It was either not saving correctly in the earlier build, or this specific build fails to load them correctly.

Can anyone confirm?

1519

General CG Discussion / Re: Bercon maps for 3dsmax 2015

« on: 2015-07-21, 13:32:59 »

it is possible somebody else also fixed the bug together with recompiling it (I think vlado at least tried to do it)

Yes, Vlado's recompile included some display crash fixes, it's still buggy though and may crash from what I've tested (2012 would often crash with Nitrous, 2014 was better but would also crash if using variance in coordinates rollout in BerconNoise for example).

BerconMaps are great but they've become a bit of an orphan unfortunately. I'd love to see someone dive into it and fix all the crashes and quirks.

1520

[Max] I need help! / Re: Resource efficiency question

« on: 2015-07-20, 22:54:57 »

Interesting question. You should be able to find out by loading a high res texture (like a 1GB file) and run a render.

From what I know other renderers do load a map only once, even if they are not instanced or nested in different places etc. As long as the filename/path is the same it's loaded only once. I have no clue what happens when they're loaded with a different gamma, though.

1521

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: Improved crop mode rendering with background in screen mapped mode

« on: 2015-07-20, 14:33:33 »

I wonder what the status on this bug is. It's one of the very basic things that shouldn't be left out and addressed soon.

1522

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: New displacement feedback

« on: 2015-07-18, 11:33:42 »

OMG, you're right. Disabled filtering and results totally rocks! New displacement needs so much less polygons to render same quality in comparison with old one, it's just ridiculous. Now if that RAM usage spike could be fixed...

BTW, what about CoronaDisplacementModifier? Can someone explain me why it's needed?

I guess it's to make displacement independent from materials so you can have different objects with different materials use one modifier for the same displacement map. Didn't test, but that's what I expect based on how it works in other renderers.

1523

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-17, 19:50:09 »

Actually, in the beginning I didn't like the sunlight object and found it clunky to work with. Now that I got used to it I'm hesitant to say that I like the change back... But I really missed viewport lighting preview from the sun so I guess I can get used to the old sun again.
It may not be hard to live without it when you work on your own but once a client wants to have a look at different sun positions with you it's just more comfortable to have a preview.
The old sun on the other hand had the big advantage that memorizing an alternate sun position was a matter of writing down two numbers and not having to clone the sun object or animating its position. IF there's a way to script a sun helper that will control the new sun object and vice versa, that would be the way to go, rotation and zenith angle are just so easy to work with.

1524

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-17, 16:57:49 »

As for the new sun, how about the target of the new sun will just be the old viewport icon and would update its rotation and zenith angle representation according to the main sun icon...? It could even display both values in the modify tab so you always exactly know what angle it's at. Does that sound useful? Is it even possible?

1525

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: Material override with 'Preserve Bump' (either in the main UI or as a pass)

« on: 2015-07-17, 15:58:52 »

I need to improve my telepathy skills then!

1526

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-17, 15:57:37 »

Yep, makes sense. How is opening old files working, all converting automagically to the new sun?

Also, blame me for requesting viewport illumination from the sun object. It IS useful.

1527

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: Material override with 'Preserve Bump' (either in the main UI or as a pass)

« on: 2015-07-17, 12:13:46 »

That's great! I'll have to find a workaround for the time being, but glad to hear it's been approved.

I just realized it should also include normal maps, not just bump - but you're probably aware of that ;)

1528

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-17, 12:04:20 »

I would gladly keep it. But it had one huge problem: its illumination could not be displayed in viewport properly.

I see - I wonder if that could've been solved on Autodesk's end without having to throw away the old sun...
There was one thing I like though, it was very straightforward to match sun position on a photograph backplate with it: you could place it at where the shadow ends on the ground in the image and move the sliders until it matches. This is less intuitive with the standard target light as you have no indication of the height of the sun, it's all one light without any real representation of where the sun really is.

How's the conversion done when loading an old project? Is a new sun created matching the old sun or do we need to do this manually?

1529

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds

« on: 2015-07-17, 11:47:05 »

So the old sun object is gone?

1530

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: Material override with 'Preserve Bump' (either in the main UI or as a pass)

« on: 2015-07-16, 12:14:21 »

I guess it makes sense. We have displacement preservation to keep overriden output same as original one silhouette-wise, which means we will also need to preserve opacity of the materials, which is already a shading effect, so there's no reason not to have bump there as well.

The question is what happens if material in override slot already has bump map? I think it would be best that if preservation of bump was enabled, bump map of material in override slot would be ignored.

Yes, in that case bump of the OR mat would have to be ignored.

I guess what makes this so important is that it's a quick way to control a lot of the final look where you rely on the level of detail being defined by the bump effect. No doubt, preserve displacement is great to have but with many scenes you just can't afford to use displacement (or it's plain impractical) so bump is the only way to introduce the needed detail. Think... airplanes with a lot of bump surface details ;)