max blend material

[super gnu]

i make extensive use of the max blend mtl. its simple and does all i need 99% of the time.

i see its not "supported" by vray.. what does this mean exactly? seems to work fine in the production renderer.

i assume it doesnt work in RT GPU?


i have a fiendishly complex painted brick material with many nested blend materials. its incredibly laggy in the material editor, sometimes freezing max for 5-10 minutes, particularly when browsing it in the material browser, or adding maps. ive no idea if the blend mtl is the culprit, there are many nested noises, multisubtex, and multisubobjects in there too.

it refuses to render in RT (i get blue walls instead) but i dont know if this is due to the blend material.

if so can i suggest an update to the vray scene converter that replaces blend materials with vrayblend?

[squintnic]

try vray blend

[Macker]

Vray blend is (imho) considerably better.

[super gnu]

yes i know about vrayblend, i also use it.. i was just wondering what the known issues are with the standard max blend? id rather not rebuild several very complex materials, but if the blendmtl is likely to be causing me issues then ill do it.

[vlado]

yes i know about vrayblend, i also use it.. i was just wondering what the known issues are with the standard max blend?

It is slow. It might not be an issue if used for one or two small objects in the scene, but if it is used a lot, rendering can be much slower. We can improve this, certainly, or we can modify the converter to convert Blend to VRayBlend...

Best regards,
Vlado

[LudvikKoutny]

Hi,

I have two questions related to the topic:

1, Is VrayBlend significantly faster than native Max's Blend Material even for simple layered materials, say base layer with with low glossiness metalic material, and one layer of mirror material on top masked with falloff map?

2, I started to get this message in some of the recent V-Ray builds:

warning: Material "Material" (Blend) is not compatible with V-Ray and may cause problems

I always used Blend material almost exclusively with V-Ray because I though it performs same and does the same thing under the hood as VrayBlend. I also preferred it as it did not look like a telegraph pole in slate editor (due all those weird duplicate slots) and therefore shading networks were a bit more neat.

I don't remember getting this error longer ago, so I am wondering if Max's Blend had always performance/compatibility issues and it's just now printed in the log, or if some of the recent changes done to V-Ray introduced these compatibility limitations.

[vlado]

1, Is VrayBlend significantly faster than native Max's Blend Material even for simple layered materials, say base layer with with low glossiness metalic material, and one layer of mirror material on top masked with falloff map?

Yes, it's still faster.

I also preferred it as it did not look like a telegraph pole in slate editor (due all those weird duplicate slots) and therefore shading networks were a bit more neat.

Well, this was an unfortunate incident due to the extra parameters being required to show the material in the Nitrous viewports (the viewport doesn't support array parameters). I'm still hoping that one day we will be able to get rid of these duplicates.

I don't remember getting this error longer ago, so I am wondering if Max's Blend had always performance/compatibility issues and it's just now printed in the log, or if some of the recent changes done to V-Ray introduced these compatibility limitations.

Just the message is new. The performance issues have always been there. Like I said, this can be improved, I just never realized people used the material so much.

Best regards,
Vlado

[LudvikKoutny]

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Max's native Blend has this "Interactive" radio toggle to select which of the input slots can currently show their sub-maps in the viewport. I guess that's probably due to the same limitation. Maybe similar solution (simple dropdown to choose material slot #) could be lesser evil than double set of slots in this case... ?

[super gnu]

i have sent a max file containing the problem material to support@chaosgroup to see if you guys can figure out why it is so painfully slow .. it renders fine, not noticeably slowing the render, but in the material editor, if i click to add or modify a map or sub-material, max will freeze for 15 - 30 minutes. it also slows down work on other materials as whenever i open the material browser, its sitting in there, adding lag

i started trying to replace the blends with vrayblends, but its such a rat's nest of a material, with many nested blends and instances all over. and with a half hour delay on each change, and no guarantee it will fix it, im hoping Chaos can shed some light before i go nuts.