MAxScript: Convert Shelled Material to Standard

[BrianKitts]

I've gotten a couple questions about texture baking.... I just made it out from under a deadline and hope to post the full process soon, but for now I wanted to post the maxscripts that are a huge helper in the process.

 

The following scripts assume that you are following the texture baking process outlined in the spot3d tutorial located here:

 

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/tutorials_baking_part1.htm

 

The tutorial guides you to create shelled materials that places your newly created map in the self illumination slot of a shelled material's "baked material" slot. Problem is when taking the model into a real-time engine or Autodesk Design Review, you need to have simple standard materials with your baked material in the diffuse slot.

 

There's two different ways to handle baked materials at this point based on what you are going to do with your scene.

 

Script1 is if you are switching to scanline rendering and want to retain the map in the self illumination slot of a standard material. A common use for this would be to quickly render out an animation in 3dsmax using your baked materials. This can bring your frame times down from 30mins with Vray to about 15 seconds in scanline with a very similar quality level.

 

Technically you could just render animations from the shelled materials, however you will notice that simplifying your materials will reduce your file size and for me I just like to have the scene clean and simple.

 

for o in geometry do

 

(

if classof o.material == Shell_Material then

(

 

--reference original material

m = o.material

 

--create new material and set parameters

newmat = StandardMaterial name: m.name

 

newMat.diffuse = m.bakedMaterial.diffuse

newMat.selfIllumMap = m.bakedMaterial.selfIllumMap

newMat.useSelfIllumColor = on

 

--replace old material with new material / turn on viewport map

o.material = newMat

showtexturemap o.material o.material.selfillummap on

)

)

credit to Afshin Karimi, this script is based from his vraymaterial converter script http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/vray-material-to-standard-material

 

 

 

 

 

Script2 This script is intended to be run after script1 and will transfer your map out of the self-illumination slot into diffuse slot of a standard material. This would be the step required to take your model into a realtime engine, or export to DWF for viewing with Autodesk Design Review.

 

 

for o in geometry do

 

(

if o.material.selfIllumMap != undefined then

(

 

--reference original material

o.material.diffusemap = o.material.selfIllumMap

 

o.material.selfIllumMap = undefined

 

--showtexturemap o.material o.material.diffuseMap on

)

)

 

Note: the last line in each script turns on the visibility of your maps in the viewport. This is a personal preference and can be omitted.

Edited February 25, 2010 by BrianKitts

[cupsster]

Thank You Brian for this useful code snippet...

[hockley91]

Excellent Brian! Very much appreciated and thank you for sharing!

[hockley91]

Brian, two things are happening.

 

The first script ran fine, but the second script did not. It's giving me this error:

 

--unknown property: "selfillumMap" in undefined

 

So, I manually changed one of the textures to diffuse and then I imported that .dwf into Design review and the texture maps are not UVW aligned properly.

 

See attached photos

[BrianKitts]

check the maxscript listener, and see if it gives you a hint as to what object is causing the error.

 

Not sure what to suggest on the mapping error as I've never had any problems with mapping when crossing over to ADR..... normally the only problem I hit is too many faces and having to go back and further optimize geometry.

[quizzy]

you need to make sure the dwf format supports multiple UV channels. if not try a different export format like fbx.

[hockley91]

Well, I'm stumped. I tried it again this time from scratch. I did some simple boxes and grouped them all together and mapped them, and then texture baked.

 

I applied the two scripts and brought it into Design Review and it looks fine. The UVW mapping is correct also.

 

So, I don't know what the deal is with the other existing model I was working with.

[Koper]

Marking this thread as IMPORTANT

 

Thanx BK

[jinsley]

I think I am doing the process slightly different... maybe because I am using mental ray? When I bake out the textures I set the full map to go to the diffuse slot, the shell material to be shown in both the render and viewport and then just export the dwf when it is done... seems to work.

 

Here is a screen grab from the patient room I am doing for a proposal at the moment. It is a test with low res maps and not finished yet... I will post some final screens from the finished model next week and the dwf if people are interested.

[hockley91]

Jinsley,

 

looks good so far!

[jinsley]

Jinsley,

 

looks good so far!

 

THX! here is a still render from the final room... when the proposal and presentation is done, I will post the full dwf... with size limits on the dwf, what is the best way to do this?

[hockley91]

Jinsley, That still render looks really good also! How did that final DWF turn out? I've had some pretty large DWF files. I did a fully baked Residence Hall exterior and site. It's around 32 mb, but originally it was around 60 mb. I had to reduce texture sizes. If they are too large...say over 2,000 pixels width, then the DWF exporter kinda of compresses them automatically and strange results can occur...

[jinsley]

The final turned out great... wasn't the fastest to load, but everyone was very happy with it. I think the final was around 15mb... I never noticed whether the maps were being compressed... I noticed that the dwf displays differently depending on the machine and video card though... the same model on 3 computers can look very different as far as the textures go.

 

I would love to do a full site. Definitely have that planned for down the road... that would be a killer presentation.

[hockley91]

I'm having so much trouble converting a shelled material to a standard material. When I texture bake, the shell material is leaving the "original material" and the "baked material". I tried the conversion scripts and can't get the shell material to transfer over to the standard. I modified the script so it changes them all to standard, but the textures are not present. It all goes to default materials colors. The original and baked texture maps are both diffuse, but it won't transfer the baked diffuse over the standard diffuse. Any ideas?