ShaderFX Realtime Shadows in 3ds Max

shawnolson

Starting to fall in love with ShaderFX. But now I've hit a wall I cannot figure out: realtime shadows from scene lights in 3ds Max. I watched a video linked from Kees' site that shows realtime shadows working in the vanilla Maya implementation. But I cannot get them to work in Max, regardless of light settings. I'm assuming there is some extra voodoo that needs added to the SFX tree.

Can anyone share a sample tree or method for getting realtime shadows with SFX in Max 2015+?

shaderfx

Hey,

There isn't anything you can do about this.
The 3dsMax team has to make some changes to support shadow maps.

I believe this was being worked on, but haven't checked if it is finished.

shawnolson

Ugh... that is a kick in the nuts!

But at least you saved me another week of frustration trying to figure this out.

So I guess maybe you could answer some other questions that are a bit related. Is there a trick to get direct lights to work as infinitely far away (like a sun system) with SFX? I'd like to get the light to cast from a direct light, but the origin of the light to come from far away. The light entities in the game must be located within the level, but because of this, the geometry behind the direct light is not lit. I could, in theory, move the light back to the farthest point in the level, but that isn't perfect and doesn't really solve the real issue.

shaderfx

aren't directional lights already considered to be only a direction and not a position?

Or am I missing your point?

shawnolson

As it turns out, the issue was in part due to some of my own confusion. But perhaps you can explain if it is working as intended:

My confusion was that a Direct Light is not automatically detected as a direct light. Instead, you have to manually set the Light 0 type to 4.

This is cumbersome and is definitely inferior to how the Maya implementation is (as I understand based on this demonstration):

https://youtu.be/hn0fWfrHtJM?t=14m10s

Of course, it's certainly possible that I've missed some essential aspect of the Max workflow for ShaderFX. But direct lights haven't worked as direct lights even with the default SFX graph in any test I've made without manually setting that parameter. And presume you have a scene with dozens of shaders ... it just seems like a bothersome oversight.

Please explain to me if I've missed something important, which is, I hope, what has happened.

shaderfx

You are correct
You manually have to set the light type in 3dsMax.

These are all things I have proposed to the 3dsmax viewport team for improvements already.

shawnolson

Thank you for all the info, Kees.

Maybe you can express to the team that this is just one more small piece of the mural in the population that feeds the paranoia of the Max world in regards to Maya. In this case, a Max innovator such as you was hired by AD to take your tool to Maya... and the Maya implementation appears to now surpass the Max implementation. I'm aware it's more complex than that... but it adds up to feed the ire/nervousness in the Max world.

In the end, I'm just hoping that we see the Max side work as seamlessly as the Maya side. The two issues on this page are really handicaps for visualizing environments in Max with SFX. SFX is obviously an awesome tool, but some enthusiasm got sapped from me due to this.

shaderfx

I agree with you. They are important issues to fix.

Viking

I´m also messing around with shaderfx in 3ds max 2016 for a week or so. :poly121: Have you tried the stingray version? It can throw shadows between objects and has a (very limited) opacity option.