Nick, if you want a good primer, go talk with Sam, our fx / animation coder. He worked at Pandemic on the first one. It was rather amusing talking with him about its development this past Friday.
I'll definitely be looking for testers :) as some of you mentioned. btw these are all stock assets and textures. I just made my own materials and FX nothing has been imported. (which was the rule in the competition)
If you setup your DirectX material in Max and save it as a .fx material, you can load it up as a DirectX material- like MOP says and avoid all the horrible slowdown of the pink DirectX checkbox of doom.
re: shells - there is a fx shader downloadable somewhere from nvidia that does this on solid geometry. means you don't have to actually model the shells yourself. it's apparently not too expensive to render either (one pass).
If viewport preview is important to you, then make a directx shader, and use that. Then you'll get very close to what a game engine offers. Check out Shader FX.
hi all, this is the character i've done for a contest in artbypapercut forums (showdown). the contest is finish. the total polycount of the character including the weapon and fx is @12000 polis and 2k textures( diffuse, normal map, specular map, alpha) so all critics and comments are thankful for me
I don't seem to be able to get max's new viewport shadows working with materials that have an .fx shader or a normal bump material applied to them. They work just fine with standard materials. Has anyone got this working?
Experienced Character Animation Team for hire. I'm aiming to keep our animation team fairly small and tight and use my many years experience as lead animator in game studios to lead my team to deliver high quality animation for games (or other projects types) at a reasonable price (any time-zone is fine but we're in the…
I often had that issue when turning on the hardware viewport / fx materials with SSAO etc. But yeah, doesn't seem of any help with your latest information.