Lighting and Shading a large scene in 3dsmax 2017 for Realtime viewing?

madmuffin

I have a very large scene full of instanced props I've been working on for some time now. I have the textures done, but I am struggling to make it appear to be real time in the viewpoint looking lit and textured like it was for example, in Unity, or Stingray. 

I do not want to use Unity or Stingray or something like them for this, only 3dsmax as it is the only software I own and understand. I don't have the time to learn another piece of software as this project is on a deadline, and I can only imagine it would be a nightmare to import everything into another piece of software and get it all set up the way it is here in my scene now.

 I haven't started applying the textures yet because my early forays into ShaderFX have been frustrating, Its very difficult to add multiple lights, to make sure models are being lit by the lights, and I can't figure out any way to cast shadows at all.

I want my scene to be looking like its running in a game engine with most of the things a game engine would offer if possible. I can live without bells and whistles like volumetric fog, but easily adding lights and shadows is the most important thing to me right now. Can this be done? 

This scene is not for rendering either, it is for realtime active exploring and viewing.

poopipe

Well..

It is possible to set it up the way you want - you'll need to modify/build  shaders to get it to work properly,  it'll be a bit tricky to light and it'll perform badly in comparison to a dedicated realtime engine. 

It'll be a lot less painful and will work better if you dump it all in unreal - which is why that's what everyone else does. 

madmuffin

Ive never used Unreal before but if I was to use a game engine like it or Unity or something, that game engine would have to be able to edit UVs and have all the face cutting and editing as well as the scene is far from being game engine ready in those respects, and it would take far far too long to carefully make sure every face and UV is right then export to see if it works in the scene than doing it all in-house in 3DSMax.

I don't mind if the light performs badly, but I need those shadows. Perhaps there are shaderFX preset graphs out there someone has built already I can just slot in? I have zero knowledge of how to use Shaderfx.

Getting rid of ShaderFX, I got this far with basic Max materials 


However now I can't figure out why the shadows aren't fully black, but instead are a soft grey color. My gamma is set to 1, not the weird default 2.2, and the environment texture color is black so there should be no global illumination you see going on here. Anyone know how to get full black shadows?

EDIT: Trying to fix my weird shadow problem. If I make a new scene and set gamma and LUT correction to off, the shadows go full black, however if use my existing scene and set it to off, nothing changes. 

 A brand new scene looks right:


However my scene with the exact same settings looks horribly wrong:



Can anyone explain what I am missing here? I looked everywhere and I can find no reason anywhere at all why this is happening.

EDIT: For some reason, my global illumination value was set to a 50% grey by default which was totally screwing up my scene. I never set that option in this scene so I have no idea why it defaulted to on. 

kio

Mhhh this will be a bit of a pain to pull off...actually i did something like this a few years back with an airplane interior.

do you need dynamic lighting? because i think doing this with baked lighting could work, the shader setup should be super simple for that (fetch rbg from diffuse with uv1, and multply lightmap with uv2 over that color) - but then you have to do quite some management of uvs and materials and baking.

on the other hand I really see no gain in doing this in 3dsmax - both unity&unrea or marmoset, should be pretty easy to pick up. I mean just exporting the meshes and applying materials to them is super easy in any of those - and it will just work. there is really no need to do any edititng to the meshes on the renderer side...

poopipe

Yeah, that... In ue4 (and presumably unity) you can dump the whole scene out as one fbx,  tick a few boxes, set up materials and iterate on UVs/meshes etc to your heart's content with no more effort then hitting the export button in max.

Give it a shot,  you'll be surprised 

danr

yep, as above, Unity will be a piece of piss. You'd be well down the line making it look good in all the time you'll be wrestling, and failing, with max. An hour to get to grips with it. Tops. Betcha

as above, export everything as one fbx and drop it straight in to the default scene (drag from the Project list into the scene window or into Hierarchy), which already has a camera, directional light, skybox for reflections, etc.

Your materials from Max will import straight in too, nothing to do there but tweak them if you want (they'll come in as default Standard pbr shader). You can change the values on multiple materials at once if they're all the same shader.

If you want to use baked lights or GI, select the top of the fbx in the Hierarchy and hit the 'Static' checkbox top-right in the Inspector - probably the only thing here that's vital, but a bit obscure (well, small and easily missed/forgotten). Then there's various easy to understand options under the Lighting tab, it's all tool-tipped. Hit generate and you're away.

For realtime shadows,  it probably wont default to the look you're after so you'll want to tweak it on the lights themselves, or globally under the quality settings under Edit>Project Settings>Quality