(3ds Max) RTT and V-Ray?

Eric Chadwick

Working on an art pipeline that requires photo-realistic models for offline rendering.

We also want to convert these into real-time models, for use in VR, AR, web 3d, etc.

Seems like Render to Texture could be the best route. Make a new auto UV and bake PBR maps. 

However RTT seems really unstable with V-Ray. Simplygon has been really awesome though.

Anyone tried other methods? 

Maybe Unreal's Datasmith, if we can export them out from UE to glTF ? Tried Flatiron, but it's also crashy.

Mark Dygert

Max's RTT tools have gone to shit, they where never all that good to begin with but now that they've ripped out mental ray you can't bake half of the maps that you previously could and they aren't anywhere closer to allowing you to bake other maps that you need.

To top it off using RTT leads to garbage collection and maxscript errors.


Hopefully they take some time and redo the RTT workflow, because it fuckin blows ass.

I've been doing a lot of baking in Substance designer.
https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SDDOC/Bakers

You can get really good bakes and if substance is part of your material workflow it just makes sense. The amount of detail you can add to a mid-poly model in substance is amazing and most of the time I don't bother sculpting those micro details anymore (scratches, dents, pores ect...). I still use max for primary high/low modeling and unwrapping. Oh and cage visualization if I get bake errors but until they actually improve RTT it's not worth outputting maps, most of them are missing anyway.

I would much rather spend project resources on Substance instead of VRay because it does a lot more.

RTT at least needs to be able to bake out, Opacity, AO and Curvature. Oh and not barf up a million errors when using it.

Eric Chadwick

Well, we got Flatiron to work! It's a pretty nice little baker.

We're able to bake all the V-Ray render elements. Now just need to figure out how to combine them to make glTF compliant maps. Easy, right?