The live-placement tool you see there in the video is really great:
used it already in a project where i had to place and align a 100 objects on a heavily distorted and stretched mesh in the viewport. Positions depended on texture content on that object. Texture was a geographic map and positions were defined by small citys/towns on that map...
Could'nt think of a faster way of placing the objects than this new tool ( besides scripting and looking up UV coordinates or something)
This is the inside of the surface shader though.
As an artist you never have to go in there to connect things.
You just connect a single node to the material grp and then quickly close the node editor and just use texture slots etc in the material editor rollout to setup the shader.
But what I get from Kees post is that Nitrous can't display shadows on objects that use a custom shader or ShaderFX, is that correct?
this is what i was asking about before prophecies shit on my dreams... (just poking):) i assumed we were talking about direct x in nitrous, no one brought up regular materials in the fist place........
the shader is beautiful no doubt, its a good step so cheers to you shader fx, but please push for a fully functional display!!!! until then i just need a quick basic viewport material setup and the shader effort will be in my display engine.
but yea there is some great potential in there. right direction
this is what i was asking about before prophecies shit on my dreams... (just poking):) i assumed we were talking about direct x in nitrous, no one brought up regular materials in the fist place........
the shader is beautiful no doubt, its a good step so cheers to you shader fx, but please push for a fully functional display!!!! until then i just need a quick basic viewport material setup and the shader effort will be in my display engine.
but yea there is some great potential in there. right direction
*facepalm* My bad! Really should have been paying more attention. It is unfortunate that Nitrous still doesn't support basic needs in this day and age.
I've been using that Bobo script and variants of it for around a decade now. It's been the easiest way to hand place small detail models on a large surface.
What I like is that I can click on the surface and drag the greeble around to position it, and then click drag to rotate it around it's yaw until it's in the right location/orientation. It's a pretty nice workflow.
This is the inside of the surface shader though.
As an artist you never have to go in there to connect things.
You just connect a single node to the material grp and then quickly close the node editor and just use texture slots etc in the material editor rollout to setup the shader.
This is why we have invented technical artists.
Seriously, thats a really weird reply.
You really should take a look at shaderforge. putting bad UI on anyone, technical artists or "normal" artists is just not a very great decision.
Don't get me wrong its about time for nodebased shader editing in max and i love your tool but the color choices are really bad. at least in the thumbnail here on my phone.
There are a number of tools available to keep things organized, the group command is pretty great. You can set groups to be read of the local disk as well sort of like the functions tool in unreal.
What Kees is saying here is that the image he was showing is inside the Surface Shader, something you don't have access to inside of ShaderForge, or the Unreal Material editor. This means you can edit complex things like geometric and specular terms with nodes as well as with custom HLSL, or CG.
If he was to exit this group it becomes significantly more organized. In addition to this you can pin wires to move them out of the way change their draw style etc. The wire colors also have specific meanings indicated the different variable types. This is true about the nodes as well, different colors indicate different command types.
The colors are also dynamic in a sense, when you work within different node areas it highlights the flow fading some of the other information away.
Finally all of this can be exposed to the attributes editor in Maya or the material browser in Max.
That's an interesting question, actually. Is that what keeps people going? Without the modifier stack, would anyone stick with Max? Or would you be more open to exploring other apps...
That's an interesting question, actually. Is that what keeps people going? Without the modifier stack, would anyone stick with Max? Or would you be more open to exploring other apps...
The Modifier Stack, Particle Flow, the Slate Editor, CAT, great poly modeling tools, great viewport performance, sh*t loads of scripts and plugins for almost anything big or small, and now ShaderFX(wink) to name some, oh, also the amazing Egg spline shape...
No actually it's more than that, I simply enjoy it, I get creative when I work in Max, the way I combine different modifiers and come up with new workflows and techniques, the same thing goes when working with pflow(in my opinion the equivalent to the modifier stack in the world of particle systems ), and specially now that pflow has become so fun to work with thanks to ADM and mParticles, and I'm really comfortable with the poly modeling tools in it, love the ribbon and how it integrated polyboost/graphite, I'm simply happy when working in Max and there has been seldom a day that I haven't come up with and/or learned a new cool trick in it even after all this time...
Yes I'm aware of it's rather aging ui and how each part of it seems it belongs to a different era, and I've done minimal work with both Maya and Modo and like how uniform their ui feels, and sure each have unique features of their own(as does Max) that can solve some things quicker, but to be honest with you each time spending some time in any of those tools I just couldn't wait to come back to the cozy(for me at least) feeling of Max, although it might be just me feeling that way...
And one last thing, I really think things are changing for Max, and to me there's never been a better time to be a Max user that now, again that may be just me.
I think you misunderstand my reply.
On a top-level ShaderFX is very similar to Unreal or ShaderForge.
You drop down texture maps, colors etc.
Connect them to recognizable inputs like diffuse, specular, normal etc.
Got a question for you on this. Would you say that this setup can be used in production where the engine doesn't have its own material editor?
What I mean is, say I'm on a project where all shaders in the engine are made by programmers. Would this enable us to shift that load to a tech artist, and have him export code to give the programmers?
I was in just that situation not long ago. And actually what we ended up doing is I found some very old version of ShaderFX online somewhere and used that. It wasn't ideal, but it worked for us.
ShaderFX allows you to export the same graph to HLSL, CGFX and GLSL.
So with a little bit of work on your engine side, you can use them.
If the old ShaderFX worked for you, then this version will work much better for you in that regards.
I do want to clarify we do not output shaders specifically for Unity or Unreal.
We output generic (standard) shaders files not specifically aimed at any engine.
Your negativity Ark is so unnecessary and non constructive. Sweeping statements that have no evidence is probably fairly insulting to those who are dedicated to improving the product.
Forgive me, but I find it hard to bring any positivity to the table when were talking Autodesk.
We're talking a company that barely innovates or listens to it's customers, never mind every annual lacklustre update.
I don't see how ripping code from one product to put in another is considered insulting, since it's been happening frequently with XSI and Maya.
Guys, along with the planned new features, 3 other top rated features just went "Under Review"(one of them being the fluid system, finally!), for some reason they suddenly seem very serious about Max, long, long overdue and I hope this new aggressive behavior is one that's going to stay. keep on going Eddie Perlberg!
Replies
used it already in a project where i had to place and align a 100 objects on a heavily distorted and stretched mesh in the viewport. Positions depended on texture content on that object. Texture was a geographic map and positions were defined by small citys/towns on that map...
Could'nt think of a faster way of placing the objects than this new tool ( besides scripting and looking up UV coordinates or something)
This is, unfortunately, correct.
Nitrous "realistic" mode shows shadows and transparency for internal materials only, custom DX shaders are not supported for this. :poly127:
You can switch to "Shaded" mode to see basic transparency for DX/ShaderFX materials, but it is not exactly perfect.
This is the inside of the surface shader though.
As an artist you never have to go in there to connect things.
You just connect a single node to the material grp and then quickly close the node editor and just use texture slots etc in the material editor rollout to setup the shader.
This is why we have invented technical artists.
this is what i was asking about before prophecies shit on my dreams... (just poking):) i assumed we were talking about direct x in nitrous, no one brought up regular materials in the fist place........
the shader is beautiful no doubt, its a good step so cheers to you shader fx, but please push for a fully functional display!!!! until then i just need a quick basic viewport material setup and the shader effort will be in my display engine.
but yea there is some great potential in there. right direction
*facepalm* My bad! Really should have been paying more attention. It is unfortunate that Nitrous still doesn't support basic needs in this day and age.
Is it this one:
http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs4/alignobject2face/
I've been using that Bobo script and variants of it for around a decade now. It's been the easiest way to hand place small detail models on a large surface.
EDIT : This I believe : http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/clavertech-aligntosurface
What I like is that I can click on the surface and drag the greeble around to position it, and then click drag to rotate it around it's yaw until it's in the right location/orientation. It's a pretty nice workflow.
No maxscript access to the node editor itself yet.
The properties exposed to the Material editor rollout do have maxscript access.
We do have full MEL access in Maya to just about everything I could think of that would be useful via the 'shaderfx' command.
Seriously, thats a really weird reply.
You really should take a look at shaderforge. putting bad UI on anyone, technical artists or "normal" artists is just not a very great decision.
Don't get me wrong its about time for nodebased shader editing in max and i love your tool but the color choices are really bad. at least in the thumbnail here on my phone.
What Kees is saying here is that the image he was showing is inside the Surface Shader, something you don't have access to inside of ShaderForge, or the Unreal Material editor. This means you can edit complex things like geometric and specular terms with nodes as well as with custom HLSL, or CG.
If he was to exit this group it becomes significantly more organized. In addition to this you can pin wires to move them out of the way change their draw style etc. The wire colors also have specific meanings indicated the different variable types. This is true about the nodes as well, different colors indicate different command types.
The colors are also dynamic in a sense, when you work within different node areas it highlights the flow fading some of the other information away.
Finally all of this can be exposed to the attributes editor in Maya or the material browser in Max.
I found it pretty easy to work with.
I think you misunderstand my reply.
On a top-level ShaderFX is very similar to Unreal or ShaderForge.
You drop down texture maps, colors etc.
Connect them to recognizable inputs like diffuse, specular, normal etc.
Then, if you so desire, you can actually open the groups and look inside. Just like you can do in XSI compounds.
And that is the screenshot I posted.
More on grouping here:
[ame="
The playback in Stepped Tangent preview mode, that the current version of Maya has.
The Modifier Stack, Particle Flow, the Slate Editor, CAT, great poly modeling tools, great viewport performance, sh*t loads of scripts and plugins for almost anything big or small, and now ShaderFX(wink) to name some, oh, also the amazing Egg spline shape...
No actually it's more than that, I simply enjoy it, I get creative when I work in Max, the way I combine different modifiers and come up with new workflows and techniques, the same thing goes when working with pflow(in my opinion the equivalent to the modifier stack in the world of particle systems ), and specially now that pflow has become so fun to work with thanks to ADM and mParticles, and I'm really comfortable with the poly modeling tools in it, love the ribbon and how it integrated polyboost/graphite, I'm simply happy when working in Max and there has been seldom a day that I haven't come up with and/or learned a new cool trick in it even after all this time...
Yes I'm aware of it's rather aging ui and how each part of it seems it belongs to a different era, and I've done minimal work with both Maya and Modo and like how uniform their ui feels, and sure each have unique features of their own(as does Max) that can solve some things quicker, but to be honest with you each time spending some time in any of those tools I just couldn't wait to come back to the cozy(for me at least) feeling of Max, although it might be just me feeling that way...
And one last thing, I really think things are changing for Max, and to me there's never been a better time to be a Max user that now, again that may be just me.
Got a question for you on this. Would you say that this setup can be used in production where the engine doesn't have its own material editor?
What I mean is, say I'm on a project where all shaders in the engine are made by programmers. Would this enable us to shift that load to a tech artist, and have him export code to give the programmers?
I was in just that situation not long ago. And actually what we ended up doing is I found some very old version of ShaderFX online somewhere and used that. It wasn't ideal, but it worked for us.
So with a little bit of work on your engine side, you can use them.
If the old ShaderFX worked for you, then this version will work much better for you in that regards.
I do want to clarify we do not output shaders specifically for Unity or Unreal.
We output generic (standard) shaders files not specifically aimed at any engine.
Can it do render to texture, i.e. live reflections?
Live reflections, no.
You can pass it an old fashioned cube map or latlong reflection map.
So if you have someway to render one of those from your scene, then you can use that.
Will there be a way to load .sfx project files from the last version of Shader FX?
I'd love to see all that helpful content from the old forum come alive again. Probably not trivial to resurrect it. But maybe read-only searchable?
I recently got an email saying that a feature request that I followed has been set to "planned"
Looks like the new max is getting quad chamfers!
http://3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/80695-general-feature-requests/suggestions/1493505-quad-chamfers
Definitely a solid new feature lol. Surprised something so basic was missing like that.
http://www.mariussilaghi.com/products/quad-chamfer-modifier
His modifier does wonderful things like chamfering at smoothing group boundaries.
We're talking a company that barely innovates or listens to it's customers, never mind every annual lacklustre update.
I don't see how ripping code from one product to put in another is considered insulting, since it's been happening frequently with XSI and Maya.