3DsMax RenderToTexture Glossiness map. Nowhere to be found?
polycounter lvl 3
Hello!
I am rendering various maps to texture, such as diffuse, n-map, and so on. However I cannot seem to grab the reflection map from my high-poly models. Without reflection maps, my models will either be uniformly reflective everywhere, or, will have to be entirely matte... which wont work for my shiny metal objects.
There's the issue, it's not among my choices. The Specular Map also doesnt work, it really only gives speculars... not glossiness maps of any sort.
What do?
EDIT: Could have posted a new reply with the solution, but this will be more readily exposed to people who run into this topic by searching and whatnot.
I have made a setup that looks like this.
The ID1 is the diffuse stuff, the actual materials on my highpoly models.
The ID2 stuff has the same hierarchy but with greyscale glossiness maps in diffuse slots, I apply this one when I want to RTT the glossy maps.
The ID3 is the lowpoly material with all the baked textures; I decided not to use up an extra material slot when all three of these dont need to be kept separate for any reason anyway.
Note that the first two are MultiSubObjects themselves. When I want to apply materials to my ID'd objects, must drag them from this list; otherwise the main material is applied and the materials then act oddly because each of the three MSO's is attempting to put its own materials to the object's IDs.
Also note that the first material is three plain colours. I decided that I'll paint my diffuse through 3D Coat so in Max I've instead just rendered simple channel colours so as to use them as masks later in Photoshop, and they proved useful for quick section-selection.
I havent posted right away because I wanted to try it out for a bit before I give rushed impressions, then I had some technical difficulties, and also annoyances... such as having difficulties getting the Max-to-3DC applink to properly work, but I won. By the way, the maps that I've had prepared didnt turn out too well anyway, so this technique is something that I'll apply to any upcoming models where such reflections will fit better; my current scene is not reflection-heavy now that I think about it. This is what I've been making by the way.
I know that this is offtopic, but here's a bonus tip for anyone who stumbles in and didnt know it before; I've only fairly recently figured it out myself.
In this last image with the crates, I'm really only using one material for them all. I have used a Composite material in the diffuse slot. My bottom layer's the actual diffuse layer, but with the paintable area greyed out. Then the layer above it is "ObjectColor", provided by MentalRay. It acts as a colour swatch (good for use with blending modes), and the colour is whatever colour/wireframe is the object that carries this map; I also applied a mask to this particular layer so that the entire crate would not be coloured, but only a specific part of it. This allowed me to have multicoloured crates, all left as instances (wireframe colour is pet-object), and only one material, without resorting to copies that only differ in a single colour swatch. Enjoy!
I am rendering various maps to texture, such as diffuse, n-map, and so on. However I cannot seem to grab the reflection map from my high-poly models. Without reflection maps, my models will either be uniformly reflective everywhere, or, will have to be entirely matte... which wont work for my shiny metal objects.
There's the issue, it's not among my choices. The Specular Map also doesnt work, it really only gives speculars... not glossiness maps of any sort.
What do?
EDIT: Could have posted a new reply with the solution, but this will be more readily exposed to people who run into this topic by searching and whatnot.
I have made a setup that looks like this.
The ID1 is the diffuse stuff, the actual materials on my highpoly models.
The ID2 stuff has the same hierarchy but with greyscale glossiness maps in diffuse slots, I apply this one when I want to RTT the glossy maps.
The ID3 is the lowpoly material with all the baked textures; I decided not to use up an extra material slot when all three of these dont need to be kept separate for any reason anyway.
Note that the first two are MultiSubObjects themselves. When I want to apply materials to my ID'd objects, must drag them from this list; otherwise the main material is applied and the materials then act oddly because each of the three MSO's is attempting to put its own materials to the object's IDs.
Also note that the first material is three plain colours. I decided that I'll paint my diffuse through 3D Coat so in Max I've instead just rendered simple channel colours so as to use them as masks later in Photoshop, and they proved useful for quick section-selection.
I havent posted right away because I wanted to try it out for a bit before I give rushed impressions, then I had some technical difficulties, and also annoyances... such as having difficulties getting the Max-to-3DC applink to properly work, but I won. By the way, the maps that I've had prepared didnt turn out too well anyway, so this technique is something that I'll apply to any upcoming models where such reflections will fit better; my current scene is not reflection-heavy now that I think about it. This is what I've been making by the way.
I know that this is offtopic, but here's a bonus tip for anyone who stumbles in and didnt know it before; I've only fairly recently figured it out myself.
In this last image with the crates, I'm really only using one material for them all. I have used a Composite material in the diffuse slot. My bottom layer's the actual diffuse layer, but with the paintable area greyed out. Then the layer above it is "ObjectColor", provided by MentalRay. It acts as a colour swatch (good for use with blending modes), and the colour is whatever colour/wireframe is the object that carries this map; I also applied a mask to this particular layer so that the entire crate would not be coloured, but only a specific part of it. This allowed me to have multicoloured crates, all left as instances (wireframe colour is pet-object), and only one material, without resorting to copies that only differ in a single colour swatch. Enjoy!
Replies
Thank you for trying, but I cant make practical use of these two answers and my issue is still unsolved.
1. You have no clue how to author specular or glossiness maps and don't understand how they work.
2. You are trying to bake a material mask out and confusing your terminology.
You can select each individual object and set a primary color to it, bake this material mask in your 3D app and then use your texturing app to assign a gloss level to those colors. This is a common technique used by many artists.
You could set those values as diffuse and bake these out as a diffuse map and use these values as a base for your glossmap.
Or do you want to bake out those fancy blurred reflections of your model? This would not work.
I think that I fully understand what you are saying. Tho my problem is that I not only need to set the gloss amounts, but gloss texture, such as rusted metal (it is matte in damaged sections and glossy in undamaged sections) and also such as brushed metal (which may have matte surface and glossy scratches). I cannot add these manually to curved surfaces of my lowpoly as they will not fit. These textures fit onto my highpoly models, but UVs there are vastly different too.
Suppose that I have a brushed metal texture (or tiles or anything similarly regular) and my lowpoly UVs are curved; that is, they dont consist of only horizontal, vertical, and 45 degree angle diagonal edges. If I create a mask in my image editor, and slap my brushed metal texture over it, it's not going to follow the edges. And if I straighten out those edges in the UV, I will introduce distortion. and if I manually curve the texture (in my texture editor) to fit it everywhere, it will never fit as properly as if it was generated. As in, I cant match the output that the RTT would give me if I was able to pick up this map.
EDIT: That idea is crazy enough that it might work! I can see this getting unwieldy if I have many materials, but for now I will try it and see what I get. I will go to the high-poly materials and swap their diffuse and reflection, then RTT their now-diffuse map.
If you have them all in a multi-sub material you can just make a new multi-sub material with the maps put into the diffuse. This way you can easily swap it back. I do this all the time when I'm using max and RTT.
Thank you for the tip, that will help even further, yeah all my high-poly maps are in a MultiSubObject. So what I need to do is create a counterpart MSO to the main one, except this one will have just the reflection maps, and they will be in the diffuse slot? That's pretty neat, I wouldnt have thought of this on my own in who knows how long.
I've just rendered some maps in the background, and while this is a bit slower than I initially hoped, it does work. I've also implemented Quack's help for reflective materials which have no reflection map... I've rendered them as masks instead. Off to play with this! Will come back if anything else pops up regarding this.
Thank you!
cool, tell us how it went, i guess a couple of other folks might stumble upon this.