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I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 8:48 am
by TonyD
These are the most Noob question, but I just, for the life of me, do not have any idea what to do.

1st - I have followed instrux on how to assign renderer in 3DS max, but the scene only comes up as the white mesh, no materials. But there are material in the scene in the Slate editor and Max renders fine with materials in Vray, Scanline, etc. Any ideas. I know I'm missing a step, but it's not clearly outlined anywhere.

2nd - How do you render an animation?

Any guidiance, or redirect to a link is appreciated.

Sincerely,
the iPad generation (one button does everything)

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 11:51 pm
by TonyD
Okay, so I see now that you can set Animation range in common, and render out frames in sequence to a folder path. That takes care of my 2nd question.

But the materials, do they need to be in a certain format to be processed by Indigo?
The scene I brought in to 3DS Max already has mats (not VRAY). When I create the primitive teapot per instrux, it renders it with the material. But not this other scene brought in with materials....

Is there a material conversion process that needs to take takes place?

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 12:21 am
by Oscar J
Yeah I think you need to create Indigo materials with Indigo maps in order to render them. I don't know if there's any scene converter at the moment. :?

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 12:27 am
by TonyD
Okay, thanks OscarJ.
I see there is the option to go through each material and convert them individually to an Indigo Material, fair enough.

Now , the next part I am not familiar with yet. :(
I have an Opacity map but there is no Opacity channel in the Indigo Material.
(There is also no 'Diffuse' but I know to put that in 'Albedo'.)
But what of an opacity mask map, where does Opacity go, or how does that work in Indigo?

Thx!

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 2:19 am
by TonyD
Okay...
So...
Indigo has a "Blend Material":
1) Plug in original 'Diffuse' map into an Albedo Channel of an Indigo Material, then
2) plug that into Material A or B of the Blend Material, leaving the other unused (A or B) as 'Null'.
3) Then take the Opacity map and plug that into the Blend texture channel itself (Not Material A or B). It defaults to 0.5..

Okay, so I do this, but the Opacity map does not blend in the render.
Is there anyone who knows how to apply opacity maps properly into the blend channel of a Blend material in Indigo Max? Or anything Indigo, this step is unfamiliar to me.

THX!

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 3:07 am
by Oscar J
Hmm, I've always just used transparent textures instead. Maybe that can be a viable workaround?

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 5:42 am
by TonyD
Ah!
You helped me here, indirectly!
I will explain...

I took your thought of a transparent image, thinking of how a PNG works, and just to try, I inverted the Opacity map in external editor (GIMP) (greyscale invert).
And...This allowed the blend to take place, very strange!

It's almost as if other software, ie Daz Studio, will itself invert a map and thus provide the blend, here you have to take care of that step yourself to ensure the Opacity is inverting against the Diffuse properly.

But the Indigo piece is working, it just need the Opacity image inverted, and then the Blend Material was able to process it.

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!!!

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 5:49 am
by tar_gniK
EDIT: It appears you've solved your problem, but I'll add my reply anyway..

IndigoMax doesn't support Standard materials (ie the material format that comes with Max.)

This is a huge downside that I have already noted to Glare. That is probably why you are finding your ready-to-go, fully set-up scene with materials rendering all white. So, converting them to Indigo Materials is the "workaround". So in a scenario where you want to do a quick test render with a Max file made with a different renderer, you'll need to convert.

Obviously in the long run to make the most of Indigo, you would want to use Indigo Materials anyway, but even Maxigo 3.2 used to be able to render basic Vray and Max Standard materials for quick tests... :?

Anyway -- to use a material with opacity, you need to make one image with the alpha channel containing the opacity map. Easy to do in PS or Gimp. Save this as a .png, and then plug it into the albedo channel. No need for blend.

This is another I also noted to Glare - there are times when an opacity channel is much preferred to having to then create a new texture .png file, combining the alpha channels - it can get time-consuming.

Re: I'm Just Going to Ask....

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 7:23 am
by TonyD
Yeah, let's get a nice added feature set for the 3DS Max plugin.
It's 3DS Max after all....
3DS MAX
MAX, as in MAXIMUM.

MAXIMUM potential for Indigo to overtake Arnold, Redshift, Vray, Octane, Iray, and Quicksilver...
or as I call them, The Sinister-6