Viewport transparency w/Vray Mats and Max8?

[skogzort]

Hello,
I recently started using Max 8 sp1 and I can't figure out how to make transparency work in the viewports when using Vray materials on opacity mapped planes. I have viewport transparency set to best. I'm using open GL. I can enable the textures to show from the material editor, but not the transparency. Can anyone tell me what is the trick to making Vray Materials with opacity mapping show up with the transparency working in the viewports in Max 8?

Thank You for the help

[andrewjohn81]

I'm rendering right now so I can't test it, but I don't think transparency shows if you have a map showing on an object.

I am using Maxtreme, but it's based on OpenGL. Transparency works fine in the viewport for vray materials here.

If you have an nvidia card I might recommend the maxtreme drivers. The viewport is ALOT faster. We can work smoothly with at least 4 times the poly count in the viewport than openGL. My coworkers didn't believe me until I opened a file on my computer that was choking really bad for one guy and I panned, zoomed, and rotated smoothly with no jerks.
It still took a while to shade the thing, but after it was shaded it ran smooth.

[Candelero]

@ andrewjohn81

Can you please give some more info on those maxtreme drivers for nVidia ?


Best regards,
nikki Candelero

[andrewjohn81]

they are a bit hard to find on the Nvidia site.
It's really dumb. If you type in "Maxtreme 8" in the search engine it comes up 4th. Either do that, or go to this link here.

They piggyback off of the current Nvidia drivers, so make sure you have those too. The current ones are 81.67 I think. They update them fairly often.


As far as speed goes, I actually have the quality of the maxtreme drivers turned up quite a bit and it's still Alot faster.

You may get some strange errors, but I guess that depends on the computer. For instance, when animating, I use the maxtreme because it's faster. If i have to model I switch to something else sometimes though because for some reason the verts don't line up in the viewport. I've heard of other people having that problem as well.

I've got the Quadro fx4400

Hope that helps.

[trixian]

Afaik vray materials have never ever supported displaying textured opacity...only refraction ammount (rgb value) as transparancy in opengl.
One thing is that it lacks the "show material in viewport button" the standard materials have at the top lvl, so it can display all (at least what opengl in max supports) the currently used maps. Vray mats can only display one map at a time.

[jujubee]

I've found D3D to be much faster than OpenGL at this point. You may want to switch over and see if transparency works better this way. Also, I don't think Maxtreme works on regular Nvidia cards - only the Quadro series.

[trixian]

Using Dx9 will have no effect, as the shortcoming is in the vray material, not the display driver.
As a side note, dx9 is very flaky in max. Not sure who is to blame for this, but my money is actually on autodesk, and some shoddy programming.
For large projects, I always go for opengl as it is stable at least. Dx is good for making fancy previews mith reflecion maps and bump etc, and it handles static scenes nicely (caching static meshes) , but deforming geometry is just as heavy as in opengl.

[mike.edel]

Dx is good for making fancy previews mith reflecion maps and bump etc, and it handles static scenes nicely (caching static meshes) , but deforming geometry is just as heavy as in opengl.

imho thats no sloppy programming but a given fact of almost all graphics engines: normally non-static geometry has to be transferred to the gpu and recalculated every frame - this eats up cpu power

there are tricks to get around this (namely using vertex shaders to deform predefined geometry in the gpu without putting load on the cpu and the bus) but those are currently only availlable in gaming engines

i think i saw a similar feature in later versions of character studio, but i'm not sure
btw: of course i'd prefer if autodesk would integrate something like this in max (perhaps using object properties to enable gpu vertex shader deformations on a per object basis since shader performance can be quite limited)

a simple example of mesh deformation with vertex shaders:
http://www.codesampler.com/dx9src/dx...x_displacement
http://www.codesampler.com/source/dx...splacement.zip
you need to have the cg toolkit of nvidia installed:
http://download.nvidia.com/developer....4.1_Setup.exe