Thanks guys for all the love! They are not realtime, they are rendered in max. The first one is max default scanline renderer and the second one was rendered out in mental ray. They were more of personal projects for me. To get away of some of the stuff i was doing at work. needed to express myself.
Looks like you've turned on soft selection. Double click the select (or translate/rotate/scale) tool on the left toolbar and in the tool settings palette uncheck soft selection. I'm not a regular Maya user so I don't know what the hotkey is, or if there even is one by default.
Easy enough. Connect the "outcolor" output of your texture to the "transparency" (or whatever you want to use the alpha for) input of a shader. You'll need to do this manually, as by default it hooks up "outalpha" instead. Works fine for me in the viewport with an 8 bit TGA file with no alpha channel.
Interestingly enough, Vista has support for image tags built into the OS. The default browser view (with details pane on the bottom) allows you to add tags to each image, and you can search by those tags. It's not fantastic, but it's a functional start. edit: Photomesa looks pretty nifty
Seems you input normal maps wrong : in mental ray (3dsmax) arch&design material you should put normal bump map in bump map slot, and set strengh to 1.0 default is 0.3. Thats why your normals dont have effect in renders.
I don't think so. I'm pretty sure marmoset uses Open GL as does Maya. Substance painter uses Direct X by default, but you tell it to use Open GL when you start a new project, and export from painter in either format as well.
Well yeah he still has to get rid of the default UDK skybox, paint his own, some more props and foliage maybe, and then he can worry about lighting. I think day or sunset would work really well with the colors you've used already.
You can maybe try to disable a specific setting about the lightmaps pixel bleeding. It looks like since a few betas there is some textures problem with the lightmap generation. http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/916768-Lightmass-Issue-%28black-seams-edge-pixel-padding-default-settings%29
Thanks for the clarification Erick, it helped. Guess I misunderstood it. I have to ask though. If leaving R and B blank produces better results... Why is the nvidia photoshop dxt5-nm making copies of whats in green in each of those channels by default? Is there an option I'm not seeing in it to disable?
Here is the image with AO with UV applied. Btw, I used the Diffuse map from Material Editor apply the images. Could you please tell me what Padding is? I baked the AO with default settings, if it helps. Texture sixe for all the images that I used is 1024x1024.