Manipulating a bitmap and affecting bump?

[vlado]

For all I know, you guys might have a modular code structure where bump logic is shared among the different vray material types.

It is... but we'd still have to go and add the options to the user interface, at the very least.

I also presumed that Vray and its parts would be completely free to define most of its inner workings regardless of how max in general did its things, so you would not need to conform to their standards if they were sub-optimal.

We can do that, certainly. But like I said, you'd need to wait for a next major upgrade to get this.

I also don't think the existing way of handling normals is very good, and would have wished that the intermediate normal-bump node wasn't needed (as in should be pluggable into a separate "normal slot"). That is my main logic as to why I would have preferred it intergrated like I described.

Ok, that's a different topic I do agree to a large extent - like I said, in V-Ray for Maya, the normal mapping is integrated inside the VRayMtl interface.

Best regards,
Vlado

[pailhead]

What happened to this?

[wxyz]

So you can get my first attempt here: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/misc/vray...mp_vray2_0.rar

This is currently only for V-Ray 2.0, although I can probably do a V-Ray 1.5 version, if necessary.

Extract the respective plugin in the [maxroot]\plugins\vrayplugins folder. This will add a new texture, VRayColor2Bump. Use this texture in the bump slot of materials (e.g. VRayMtl), and attach the actual color texture to it. It would be best to keep the bump amount in the material to 100, and only adjust the height parameter of VRayColor2Bump.

Note that the height is in world units, and will not scale along with an object like the 3ds Max regular bump. This is because it is actually derived by considering what would be the surface normal if the surface is displaced with the given texture (this can get quite slow with complex procedural textures, as it requires four evaluations of the base color texture).

I haven't tested this very extensively, but if you find any issues, please let me know.

Best regards,
Vlado

Is there a 1.5 version?

[rikou]

Yes please !
I'll have to upgrade soon but it would be nice to have a version for 1.5
Thx !