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Is anyone here working in Max 2012?

lionheart

lionheart

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Hey all,

Just thought I would ask if anyone is working in 2012 Max?

What do you use to render your Ambient Occlusions with? Mental Ray, Quick Silver, or Scanline?

I know that so much changed between Max 9 and Max 2012. AO is now called different things and there are new ways of handling renderings, including Mental Ray materials for AO with settings on the material instead of the Renderer Setup.

From what I am learning, it appears that Mental Ray has the best tuning selections for AO.

I am still pouring through all of the tutorials at YouTube. So much to learn. As soon as I am done learning the AO settings, I am off to learn how to map fuselages. To Pelt or to Plannar! That is the question.... :S
 
Hi Bill....I do work in max 2012...but I've stayed with scenery. My AO has been done with mental ray. I have pelt mapped, and it works. Its a different way for me to think, so I'm not fast with it. One of my initial mistakes was thinking the green colored lines and blue colored lines are all pelt seams. I spent many minutes trying to delete green seams in seam edit mode, only to find I can ignore them for pelt mapping purposes. Go figure.

Bob
 
bob5568 said:
Hi Bill....I do work in max 2012...but I've stayed with scenery. My AO has been done with mental ray. I have pelt mapped, and it works. Its a different way for me to think, so I'm not fast with it. One of my initial mistakes was thinking the green colored lines and blue colored lines are all pelt seams. I spent many minutes trying to delete green seams in seam edit mode, only to find I can ignore them for pelt mapping purposes. Go figure.

Bob
Click to expand...


Hey Bob, roger that on seams. You can click Ignore on the green auto-generated ones, I found on one tutorial. Amazing how they have so many tools for mapping with; edge selections, etc. I also found that some people hot-key the Stitch-Seam command. One guy I think used Control/R as Stitch, for joining edges of a box after flattening a box shape in UV Unwrap.

Also, another (or many) hot key Swift-Loop. A good one if you 'Nurb' I guess, having those built up edge before using Turbo-Smooth, which brings up Polygon counts to phenominal numbers... :S


Roger that Tom! Will do.
 
MODELING IN 64BIT, EXPORTING IN 32BIT

I came upon a realization last night, Tom. You had suggested to work on 64 bit for renderings, and use 32bit for exports. But.... FSX materials are only in the 32bit. So if we have all our parts pre-assigned to FSX materials, we are not able to use those in 64bit 2012 Max. :(

We would have to do a Material Over-ride or something to get the planes in there and do renderings, etc.

I think for now, I'll go back to 32bit and work in that mode until P3D have a fix for using 64bit Max.


MENTAL RAY MATERIALS

These are specialty Materials that only popup when Mental Ray is assigned as your Render engine. These Materials, which if you are using the old version Material Editor, are accessed via the small 'square' Bitmap selection button. Clicking on that brings up your Materials. Mental Ray (MR) is just below your standard Materials. They will be gone if ScanLine or another Render engine is selected.

Mind you, they are useless for exporting models into FSX, as it needs its own FSX materials (I think... It might be coverting other Materials into FSX, treating/handling them like FS9 materials... I didnt think of that).

But..... If you use Mental Ray for your Ambient Occlusion map burns, then you need the AO Material in the Mental Ray Materials list, which is where your AO settings will be (when using MR as your Render engine).
 
I don't think the renders for AO are done using FSX materials, they are combined with your regular texture bitmaps and the resulting combinations (put together in Photoshop) are then made into FSX materials. I'm only going on what I've picked up so far, but I know of one modeler using Max 9 who does something like this.
 
The render to texture is unconcerned with material type. You can assign a standard material, associate the same bmp with that material as you would with your fsx material....create the shadows you want, and render to texture the AO image.

Later when you are working with the 32 bit version, you make a new material...now a Flightsim material, and re-assign a new bitmap...this time you'll be assigning a bitmap with the AO layered over the old bitmap.

At least that's how I've done it.

Bob
 
Same here. Don't bother with materials, textures or lights. Select Mental Ray Renderer, select a part of your UVW mapped model ("xx" below), call Render To Texture, select AO, and for the rest of the settings see below (Max 2011, but probably same in 2012). Test twiddling the various AO spinners before doing your final render.

ao12_01.jpg
 
Hi Bill,

that's the question I was thinking to ask as well. I'm also still looking for the perfect setting. Anyway, that's what I do at the moment:

- The standard sky light
- Default scanline renderer
- Advanced Lighting: Light Tracer
Settings beside the standard ones:
- Rays/Sample: 300
- Bounces: 2
- Inital Sample Spacing: 2x2
- Subdivide down to: 1x1

Before rendering I aply a standard material with a pure white texture. I save the render as a png file and paste it in PS as a new layer into the original texture. Blending option is Multiply (so the white is not shown).

Kai

Edit: Mjahn posted while I made the post. Looks much better!
 
Last edited:
Thanks Guys,

Dang, I am on the right track then. I understood most of that.

Thats what I was going to do is add the AO map to the top layer in the Graphics Diffuse artwork (PSD file) in Photoshop as Multiply.

Thanks for posting your map details, MJahn. 2012 Is slightly different. They changed some of the AO a bit, from what I read in forums at CGsociety. Some major complaints about that from users.

Bill
 
bob5568 said:
Later when you are working with the 32 bit version, you make a new material...now a Flightsim material, and re-assign a new bitmap...this time you'll be assigning a bitmap with the AO layered over the old bitmap.

At least that's how I've done it.

Bob
Click to expand...


Bob, are you able to export test planes as when you are early on in the building process? If so, do the materials export ok?




Bill
 
Bill, I'm not sure what you are asking. You can export fine with flightsim textures. Early late or anytime at all. Of course with the 32bit version.

??

B
 
Ok, roger. You said you work in 64bit until a certain point, then move over to FSX textures in 32bit.

I am constantly making exports for checking the planes in-sim to see how they look there, checking for shading errors, etc. I should probably just figure on being in 32bit most of the time with FSX projects until P3D have a 64bit version.

I dont know if I mentioned this, but Wes Bard, manager of Prepar3D has said they will be making an interface kit for Max 2013, which also hopefully will be a 64bit version.


Bill
 
We just got tangled up a bit. No, actually, I work in the 32bit version of max 2012 for all flightsim projects. For my other projects, I work in the 64bit version of max 2013.
 
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