Curvature Maps in Max9?

ThatDon

Just curious if anyone know anything about this, I'm looking to try out curvature maps in my texture work flow and I'm having a bit of trouble finding how to bake them in max.

MoP

What exactly is a curvature map, and what would you use it for?

vahl

Crybaby : As I told you on MSN earlier, so far, the only corresponding shader I know for max9 is fs-curvature, which is part of the finalshader suite by CEBAS

Mop : what he wants is a shader that samples surface curvature (concavity and convexity) to be able to bake it with specific values.This is only useful if your texturing process relies heavily on that kind of maps, basically you can take one of these and extract concavity, convexity and flatness from them. This is not a cavity or dirt map. I contacted Jogshy a little while ago so that he could include them in Xnormal, but unfortunately this is rather complex to do and the xnormal output is not usable as of now.

edit : try the surfaceshade maxscript from that guy : http://www.gotogrant.com/?page=_scripts

System

Did a quick google on this but was a bit confused, it sounds similar to the rounded corners function of mental ray but if there is no similarity there at all then I am confused but would like to know more. What exactly are we faking here?

renderhjs

perhaps something like this?
http://www.polyboost.com/features_new4_0.htm
cavity map

Mark Dygert

yea, I'm confused... What is a curvature map and why do you need it?

vahl

vig, read what I wrote, I explained it (briefly, I admit)

gcmp and renderhjs, nope that's not it

Tumerboy

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/MediaAndMachines/publications/papers/smi05tdg.pdf

uh. . . ya.

MoP

I still don't really understand what you need one for ... who is using them, and what use are they during texturing?

Vahl: The link you gave seems to produce a similar effect to what using Crazybump on a baked normalmap does (although I understand it's not the same, since if you use it on a tangent-space normalmap you're only getting the "relative" curvature of the highpoly in relation to the lowpoly), however I guess it's used for the same thing in texturing, eg. as a base for masks for dirt (inside the inward curves), or scratches and wear (on the outward curves)?

ThatDon

Thought I would share this with ya.
http://www.tomcowland.com/mentalray/tc_curvature/index.html

MoP

Ah, so they're used to blend procedural material elements together? I assume for baking more complex procedurals down to lowpoly?

rooster

that looks kinda handy actually..

Blaizer

Something similar to this is what you get when you generate a displacement map using a subdivided model without any work of sculpt (instead of a flat grey)

IxenonI

So have you found a way to bake this shader in max?