I did a quick test to see if the new material was behaving as a normal PBR shader.
Looking pretty good. F0 is getting dimmed by roughness and metalness 1 is fading to white.
I couldn’t find a simple way to disable GI in ART, so the gradient looks like shit.
The thing I really like about the PhysMat is that the glossiness curve is very linear, glossiness spans across the whole range in a very natural way without turning from sharp to blurry within a small range like with many other engines. What I’m missing most from the material is that there are no amount spinners for the maps.
I’ve attached two screengrabs. It has two modes, standard and advanced, with standard having a PBR-like Metalness value, and Advanced having both, usual Reflection and Metalness. There’s an additional coating section to add another reflective layer in a simple way. I’ve exapanded the rollouts in the advanced mode.
So that advanced tab let’s you break PBR convention when using Metalness 0 and specifying Specular color ? But interesting it lets you set Diffuse Roughness. I presume that’s the lambertian curve like in Vray, for Moon-like surface.
Since I don’t see refraction, it’s part of another preset ? So that you wouldn’t mix it where it doesn’t belong ? I could like that.
But that horrible logo :- ( What were they thinking…
V-Ray is already 100% compatible with the new Physical Material in Max2017
“The Physical Material works in Scanline, Quicksilver, ART, V-Ray and mental ray at the moment.”
V-Ray will support the physical material natively, yes.
Ah the logo… I guess it’s Zap’s reference to the very early days of rendering, or just his way to say ‘I did it my way’
I would like to see it supported by Corona, too. It’s no replacement for CoronaMtl however as some special features are missing, one notable being no support for environment map overrides for relfections/refractions.
As for the diffuse roughness, can’t say what it does but I guess it’ll be the Oren-Nayar shading model. Refraction is called Transparency here. SSS is very simple to achieve and looks good imo but it’s not the same advanced SSS that we have in Corona. I guess it will be hard to translate properly to Corona’s SSS so you’ll probably want to use CoronaMtl here.
ART in general isn’t bad at all, it’s actually working well for most arch-viz related tasks but lacks some of the advanced features most advanced pipelines need. I still think it’s a very good addition to Max.
Another thing they’ve added in 2017 and that I like very much is the new Physical Sun&Sky Map. It has some very useful parameters and you can tweak it a lot. We definitely need it to be supported by Corona. Give it a go, I’m sure you’ll like it.