Ink and paint Blues

seforin

hey everyone Im currently using 3ds max 8 and im trying to to get my character to have a nice cartoon inky outline but no shade to him.

Ive applied my base color map to him and it works fine, but im also trying to apply a spec map and a alpha map to him.


But I cant find the settings to do so, does ink and paint even support alphas and spec, I see theres a setting for bump and displacement, so I dont know if im missing alpha or spec or if it even has it at all?

anyway any help would be great

Thanks

-Sef'

seforin

seriously any help would be great, I really need to figure this out by today, or im in trouble @_@

TheBoyMadeOfSnot

nope ink and paint doesn't support alpha or opacity.. it does support specular just check the highlight box and throw your map in there.

seforin

ah you serious? Thats not good, theres no way to fake doing alphas or something?

theres gotta be a way to do it?


Damn I really dont wanna flip the normals or it'll kill the poly count like crazy

Eric Chadwick

Cheap-ass way of doing the edging... use a Falloff map and tweak the mix curve. Put your diffuse in the first Falloff slot, change color of 2nd slot to black. Falloff does respect bump, but the alphas are going to be tough.

seforin

Hmm, is there any plugins for max that they have made that support the use of alphas with it?

Kinda weird they would support doing displacement and bump but no alpha.


Eric- Is the fall off map considered a form of a shader at the end? Because the lining problem isnt the issue, I have to save this as a FX file to work with XNA reason im trying to get ink and paint to fly

Eric Chadwick

Oh, thought you were rendering in Max. Falloff doesn't convert to FX, AFAIK.

If you just want ink outlines along the inside edges of your alpha, then maybe best bet is to just paint that into the diffuse there. No angle-dependency though.

For FX you're probably better off using a dedicated shader tool like ShaderFX or FX Composer or RenderMonkey. Max defaults are always going to be more limited.
http://www.puppetshop.com/shaderfx.html
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html
http://ati.amd.com/developer/rendermonkey/features.html

Ghostscape

Just to make it clear, it's possible to make shaders that use a falloff map, but you can't save out Max's fallout to .FX files.