Procedural wood

[jaggos]

Hi
I'm very new to this simbiont material, and this may sound silly. How do you do material preview on max? I found it very hard to texture.

[archcanvas]

CCS, DT textures are always infinite along XYZ dimensions. For your case, I always setup some tweaks for the DT material, and then in 3dsmax setup a few material variations based on the same DT material/map by just changing parameters of the above pre-designed tweaks. Now select the objects in your scene, use Blurscript to apply the above material variations to them randomly by one click.
I use DT quite often two years ago but now I just occasionally use it, since it's very slow.

jaggos, Darksim SimbiontMAX plugin is needed to preview DT materials in 3dsmax. In order to get the material looking right, you need to setup the material with correct coordinates. Every DT material has a pre-defined unit, so the best way is to keep your 3dsmax system unit same as DT material, therefore you can leave XYZ at its default value (which is 1). When 3dsmax system unit is different with DT material's, tick the "Use Texture Scale" option, then use a caculator to caculate the correct XYZ tiling values!

[CCS]

Thx for the reply William.

I realize that the textures are infinite. Just couldn't figure out how to make adjacent boards look different. Not sure that I totally understand your tip, but I'll try it when I play with Darktree.

Would you recommend getting it? Was thinking it would be nice for wood, stone walls, etc. Is render time really that awful? What about outputting a large enough texture map from darktree rather than using it procedurally in MAX? Knowing what you know now, would you consider buying it for a VIZ+vray workflow?

Thx

[archcanvas]

CCS, I think DT is a very good tool. It can be well integrated into your workflow. But it may also slow down both max preview performance and render speed dramatically if your scene has quite a lot of DT materials, or the DT materials are complicated. Converting DT to texture maps is a good way to overcome the speed issue, however this also lose some very very cool and unique features of DT:
1.Tweak, if you try it, will find it very powerful!
2. Unlimited depth and detail of surface bumps, results are often very convincing. A normal texture bump map has only 8-bit/256 level grayscale.
Depending on the scenes, we can try combining DT bump maps with normal diffuse texture maps (you can export a diffuse texture map from DT and then mix it with other normal texture maps in Photoshop to get more surface details), therefore reduce the workload of CPU.

[jaggos]

Hi archcanvas
thanks for your reply, I do understand all about the scale and what you said. and I also am using SimbiontMAX plugin, but what i can't get is the show Material/Map in viewport for some reson is greyed, when you apply the material the object in the scene gets the colour of the material but there's no preview of the entire map and look of the material in the viewport. is that the way spose to be or am I doing something wrong?

[glorybound]

Hi archcanvas
thanks for your reply, I do understand all about the scale and what you said. and I also am using SimbiontMAX plugin, but what i can't get is the show Material/Map in viewport for some reson is greyed, when you apply the material the object in the scene gets the colour of the material but there's no preview of the entire map and look of the material in the viewport. is that the way spose to be or am I doing something wrong?

Did you ever figure this out? I am wondering the same thing.

[3DMK]

You won't get a preview in the Viewport......It's just the way things are unfortunately. It would probably slow down the viewport too much anyway.

If you are uncomfortable using Dark tree as a procedural then you can always render them out to bitmaps [from the material editor]
That way you can just create a couple of different bitmaps & keep to your usual bitmap work-flow.

I think this is often the best & fastest way..especially for animations where flickering can be a problem.

Splitting the Simbiont materials & using individual Simbiont maps within a vray material seems also to be the best way to use things as Nothing is as good or as fast, as a Vray material inside Vray.
The simbiont proceedurals can slow things down a lot as they can be mathematically quite large & intense.

Cheers