DWIII: Shader Question:

[JacqueChoi]

I'm a little confused to which shaders in Max would fall under node based, or which ones would be disallowed:


Is the standard Metal shader a legal shader to use?

[Yung]

If I remember correctly, the max shader mentioned /banned is those made with ShaderFX, otherwise everything is fair game, as long as it came with max installed.

[FredH]

yup yup, this is true. Good Luck joxx.

[Draxxuss]

I don't believe MAX came with a DX shader, installed, that had diffuse, transparency, normal, emmisive, and spec... correct me if I'm wrong please because I need that....

[EricChadwick]

I looked at this again recently. None of the viewport shaders that ship with Max 9 solve the lighting seams you get with tangent-space normal maps. Only third-party shaders solve it, I think because they've actually chosen to include the proper calls to load the tangent basis.

These shaders solve the seams properly:

http://www.jistyles.com/main.php?id=doc&page=hlsl
http://www.bencloward.com/resources_shaders.shtml


These shaders do not:

Standard material, bitmap loaded in the Bump channel via Normal Bump, using the checkbox DX Display of Standard Material.
Standard material, Enable Plugin Material = Metal Bump9.
DirectX Shader material, with any of the .FX files that ship with Max 9.


I know it's kind of late to be writing this, but hopefully it helps someone.

Might be wiser to show off your model in Xnormal or somesuch, which does properly solve the lighting. Or simply render your model in Max (if allowed by the rules) using the scanline renderer, since the Standard material and the Normal Bump map do actually use the tangent basis properly.