mental ray facade lume shader in 3ds max

[julieann992]

Hi!

 

Can anyone give me some tips on using the facade lume shader to create realistic looking (but 2d) trees in a landscape? The only info and tutorials I can find relate to softimage.

 

Thanks!

[GGJason]

http://www.maxforums.org/thread.aspx?tid=435485

 

Wow I just saw that discussion over at maxforums.org! I'm sorry that you had to even go through that guy.

 

I can't be of any help, but was going to link you to that site until I found your post!

 

You can also try vizdepot.com's MR forum. Heck the more places you post, the better the chances are of getting an answer.

[mskin]

julie, any luck with this? i'm pretty interested in using this shader as well. having lots of difficultulty succesfully rendering trees in mental ray.

 

what a jackass at that other forum. unbelievable. you won't find any idiots like that over here.

[mskin]

This is where I am with the façade shader.

 

1. I created a Mental ray material.

2. Inserted the façade shader and Applied a 32 bit TGA image file with Alpha channel as the bitmap.

3. I then instanced the façade shader into the shadow slot of the main material.

 

What I don’t understand is why the alpha channel worked on the shadow, but not on the surface instance of the shader.

[julieann992]

hey...

 

Thanks guys. I haven't been able to try additional things or reply to any of the posts because the day after I posted we started moving our office....just got the computer back up and running today...(I only have the program at work)...sooo anyway I plan on making some more attempts this week and I'll let you know.

[jackbird]

Has anyone actually gotten Facade to work? I see some posts by Jeff Patton where he proposes it as a solution, but there's something I'm missing in my tests (max 9 SP1):

 

-Create an empty mental ray material

-Assign an Opacity base to the surface shader

-Assign a facade shader with a 32-bit TGA texture as the source, and the size in world units of the desired result to the input and opacity slots

-clone the facade shader to the shadow shader slot

-Align the pivot of a cube to the object's center and reset Xform

-Assign the material to the object

 

This appears to sort of work, but instead of overriding the UVs of the box to get the constant facing effect, I get cutouts reflecting the mapping of the box. File, render, and material tree screenshot attached - I would very much appreciate someone who knows how to make this work posting a modified working copy.

[nisus]

Hi All,

 

I have started several threads concerning the facade shader. I tested it extensively in max8, but never got it working (the way i wanted it to). Unfortunately, no one could supply any help either. So after weeks I gave up on it. It might be good to search those posts to find my findings. Maybe you'll learn something from it.

Anyway, good reminder to get me testing it again with the A+D ;-))

 

rgds

 

nisus