Glow and Gloss maps in max

Rick Stirling

For some reason I can't get my Dom War gloss and glow maps to render in max (standard material).

Both are enabled, both set to 100. I can turn my diffuse/normal/spec maps on and off and see that this changes the render, but gloss and glow are doing nothing. I can see the material editor switch from m to M in the Self Illumination and Glossiness settings too.

Edit: Glow maps don't seem to support color. Bum. ah well, thy are displaying now, but are ramped up to 400%

Edit 2: Gloss maps work perfectly at work, just not at home. That was a sodding waste of time last night then.

Sage

Rick by glow do you mean like the actual volume in the scanline or viewport??

If you want the scanline to show a glow fx you need to add a material effect to the channel you see those little numbers, it the icon next to the icon that turns on textures in the viewport? Select one go under render, and say you select effects channel one. Then select the lens effects option and add a glow

1. add material id for more control
2. go under rendering menu and select effects
3. add lens effects
4. select glow mess around with the settings.

if it's an fxs file thing you want Max ships with real time shader that does glow but you'll have to edit it so it can do the rest of the stuff maybe.

Alex

Rick Stirling

I mean like self illumination - I wanted glowing runes controlled by a texture map. I've got it working, but it seems that the map slot is basically just a strength thing from black to white, and carries no colour information.

I'll give that a go, except the "mess around with the settings" is the bit where I really need "click here, here, type 9, tick this box".

Sage

I was pretty sure the self illuminations used to do what you wanted without fuss.

Try this instead. Make a raytrace material and use the luminosity map instead, I gave me the result I was expecting.

If you want it more intense just bump up the output value.


Alex

MoP

Glow (self-illumination slot) in Max does support colour, just make sure you tick the "Color" checkbox next to the swatch in the main top area of the material.

Rick Stirling

Aye, but that just seems to make the entire object glow...

Maybe if I invert my glow map and use it as a mask....i'll give that a go.

Edit: I'll give that a go too Sage, I wonder if that's an allowable rendering system for the Dow War, I expect it is.

rollin

i don´t get it?! .. if the diffuse is green and the selfilumination is white you have a green-selfiluminated-pixel..

so where is the problem??

do you want to control the "glow"-color with the selfilumination-map?

Rick Stirling

Sage -that worked perfectly.

MoP

I did this for my Domwar1 character using Max7's DX material. I made the glowing parts on the diffuse black or very dark, then the glow map was entirely black apart from the bright blurry red/orange dots for the lights. That worked fine. No idea why it's making your whole thing glow.

Rick Stirling

Mop, did you just screen grab the results then? That's what my glow map is like at the minute - black with some bright green sections.

Sages Raytrace material idea works with the glow, but buggers up the alpha.

Sage

Yeah it seems to work if you do what Mop said as well. I can't remember it being like that though, I'm pretty sure if you had an image in that slot it didn't matter if you had the color tick on. Good to know.

Rolling the idea behind a glow map is to give the artist control of anything they want to glow and what color they want it. It usually replaces the diffuse color. So if you have a model that uses one texture sheet and you make a map black and some areas of green color the only part of the model that glows is where there is no black.

Well any render from Mental Ray is raytraced so I can't see why they would object to the raytrace material.

Alex

Rick Stirling

Rollin, just like Sage said - plus you can animate the strenth of the the glow maps, to make things get brighter over time. Well, you could if I could get the bloody things to work.

For some reason the Raytrace material insists that I invert the alpha channel. The exact same maps wrk differently between the Stndard and Raytrace materials. Inverting it obviously busts the viewport alpha display.

Rick Stirling

Did a reboot, now my Glow maps are working perfectly in the standard material. more. time. WASTED.

Gah!