3dsMax Viewport Shader

[NajumAnwar]

so i got the shader into max and it works wonderfully. Awesome shader Doylle! much appreciated!!!!

[Tiros]

Originally Posted by samgriffiths

I've noticed people use orange and blue lighting setup when using this shader, why is this?

Well, there's two simple reasons for it. First off, it looks good.. second, it brings out the depth of the normal map

Well, you don't have to use those specific colours though.. aslong as they have a nice contrast it's fine.

[warpv]

Originally Posted by Tiros

Click > http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/6379/12039096.png

Note also that this is a viewport shader. It's not for rendering. It's also made for max, and will give a bit different results for different versions of maya. It might work better than my result here as I couldn't go into high quality rendering mode. Something's bugged with maya, and my graphics card deffo have shadermodel 3 :/

Tiros - I'm trying to get this to work in Maya, but there is no hlslShader.mll in my Plug-in Manager and the file is nowhere to be seen on my computer... Is there another one I can use? How do I get this elusive hlslShader.mll? I'm on Maya 8.5 btw... Is it only in newer versions of Maya? Hopefully I can get some help on this! Thanks!

[Abeaver]

Warpv: it should be in there. However, I am using maya 2009 so not sure if it is something that is newer, but when I looked for it I scrolled through once and didn't see it. After a few times of closely examining what the plug ins were, I found it near the top of the list. It will also be in all lower case letters so maybe that threw you off a bit. Hope that helped out a bit.

[warpv]

Abeaver - Nope...I went up and down the list like 10 times and I can't find it...I also did a search on my computer and it doesn't find the file either... I do have"AshliShader.mll" will that work instead?

[NajumAnwar]

warpv: I have the file in my plug-ins folder. C:\program files\autodesk\maya\bin\plug-ins. If it isn't in there, send me a PM and ill just email you the .mll file.

[neptar]

I'm having some trouble with the shader, it could be my system settings perhaps? Does anyone else get this?

If viewed from an angle the textures get blurred, even if I set the tiling up 15times more its still blurry

Originally Posted by skidu

Turn on/up the AF in your gpu control panel.

What does that mean? Anisotropic filtering to maximum (16x) and then restart max?

[Tiros]

Hmm, well, either you could improve the filtering, or you could shut it off completely. Shutting it off will give a very sharp and pixelated look rather than blurry, but sometimes that might look a bit bad too.

as for the gpu control panel, I think he's refering to changing the se tting on your actual graphics card. They usually also come with settings for these kind of things.

And if you havn't let the graphics card override the settings for the actual applications, you could just go into max's viewport configuration and turn both mip maps and the filtering off.

[ransomInK]

doylle, i love your shader and what it can do for showcasing your game rez models. i see that you can play with the strength of the detailed normal map. i was wondering if there is a way you can control the strength of the actual normal map as well. i believe it would be nice the adjust the depth of the normal on the model. thanx again for this great shader!

[doylle]

Hi ransomInk,

glad to hear you like the shader. Technically it would be possible to adjust the strength of the normal map. But usually you have bits and pieces baked from a highpoly mesh, so if adjust the strength of that map you'll end up with bad smoothing. Hence why it's not inthere.

I haven't had time to update any of the shaders in a long time, but i'm secretly hoping that i can get a working maya version in a couple weeks.