3DS MAX - Smooth edge shader

Cactus on Fire

I noticed that Blender has a great working solution for a smooth edge shader where the mesh edge normals are rendered with smooth edges without having to do any chamfering, edgeloops or actual bevelling of the polygons. This saves a huge time on the development part and doesn't require reworking the model all over to add edgeloops to make it look smooth which is especially hard to do if you're working with booleans.

The default autodesk rounded edge shader and mentalray smooth edge shader is full of artifacts which also doesn't work properly unless it's a 90 degree angle. Does 3DS Max has a solution for this?

monster

When Max started shipping with Arnold a few versions back it included a Rounded Corners map. 
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AF3DSUG/Round+Corners

Cactus on Fire

monster said:

When Max started shipping with Arnold a few versions back it included a Rounded Corners map. 
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AF3DSUG/Round+Corners

Thanks, I'll check it out.

guitarguy00

Is this like Modo's Round-edge shader? I have read that that can be baked down to produce a Normal map instead of using Subdivision? How does that even work?

Cactus on Fire

guitarguy00 said:

Is this like Modo's Round-edge shader? I have read that that can be baked down to produce a Normal map instead of using Subdivision? How does that even work?

Yes Modo has that too. It uses convexity maps to detect mesh edges and uses some shader trick to either blur or accurately bend the normals while rendering/baking. It's very useful.

guitarguy00

Cactus on Fire said:

guitarguy00 said:

Is this like Modo's Round-edge shader? I have read that that can be baked down to produce a Normal map instead of using Subdivision? How does that even work?

Yes Modo has that too. It uses convexity maps to detect mesh edges and uses some shader trick to either blur or accurately bend the normals while rendering/baking. It's very useful.

Very impressive. Why isn't it more widely used instead of OpenSubdiv/Subvision?

Cactus on Fire

guitarguy00 said:

Cactus on Fire said:

guitarguy00 said:

Is this like Modo's Round-edge shader? I have read that that can be baked down to produce a Normal map instead of using Subdivision? How does that even work?

Yes Modo has that too. It uses convexity maps to detect mesh edges and uses some shader trick to either blur or accurately bend the normals while rendering/baking. It's very useful.

Very impressive. Why isn't it more widely used instead of OpenSubdiv/Subvision?

No clue. The shader might not work perfectly with certain angles or maybe they just recently got a proper working version. Also the ambient occlusion baking works much more accurately if the model actually has chamfered edges. But in some cases it's definitely preferable to wrapping up the whole model with edgeloops just to see smooth edges.

ZombieWells

This might work if Max had mikk tangent space normals that we could use with UE4... but right now what engine uses max normals?

ZombieWells

last time I tested it did a crap job with inserts "holes" in meshes

Cathodeus

@ZombieWells Well ... 3DSMAX do already have Mikkt

ZombieWells

I could do a quick test and see how it goes, did one years back, lets see!

monster

@ZombieWells
Before you do your test make sure to upgrade MAXtoA Render Setup Dialog > Arnold Render > MaxToA Version. That rollout will tell you if an update is available. I spent a couple hours trying to work around a bug, but the latest version had already fixed it.