DX shader for 3ds max 2013

Olli.

TL;DR: are there are DX shaders that actually WORK for 3ds max 2013? (not counting the in built one which has terrible performance)

Alright so im having a lot of troubles yo. Ever since i upgraded to max 2013, none of the conventional DX shaders i used to use work anymore (xoliuls and 3ps)
as a hotfix ive just been using the built in "realistic material" thing in 2013 which does a decent job rendering normals, but the performance is terrible. Now that i have a bit more complexity in my scene and many materials im even starting to experience bugs like insane lag when using the animation slider as well as the materials "breaking" randomly and starting to flash and display all sorts of weird things etc.

now I want to know if there is a proper DX shader for 3ds max 2013. It doesnt necessarily need to be anything fancy, I just need to be able to check out the normals and AO that i bake.

Ruz

yeah i am having similar problems, lt lags like a fat kid in the egg and spoon race.
max 2012 is fine with the same scene.

cw

max 2013 also has something wrong with the bitangent in the vertex data, dx shaders which rely on that (most which use tangent space normal mapping) will look funky even if it was more stable.

It's not great, and I don't know a fix (stick to 2011 or 2012 seems to be the way at the moment)

Xoliul

I thought I fixed it for 2013 ? This was verified by multiple people to work fine. Do you guys have the latest version?

cw

aaah sneaky - I didn't have the latest! Still some small bugs though - I'm not familiar with this way of generating the tbn and I think it has some difference from max's native way. I will need to read up on derivatives I think.

From far away it's pretty good though.

Xoliul

Ok, let's hope Olli and Ruz are both out of date as well.

And yes it's not perfect but it's the best I can do. I'm just recalculating the tangents in the shader for 2013. I think mirrored UV's might cause problems too.
I told Autodesk people in person about the problem back when it first appeared, they really should know about it so I hope we'll get a fix for it.
I'm just staying away from 2013 for now. They didn't add anything worthwhile imo.

cw

understood - your code can't handle mirrored or splits in uvs I don't think, but it's a decent workaround!

I logged this 2013 problem with AD also some time ago, so fingers crossed they will respond. I could look into a script to generate the data but I get the feeling many realtime/game folks are steering clear of 2013 because of this problem so it may not be worth the effort.

cw

<edit> already covered on the forum so d'oh.