PSD2Mat is a production proven connection between Adobe PhotoShop® and Autodesk 3D Studio MAX®. This maxscript converts layered PSD Files into a Scanline or VRay-Material. Named layers are converted to bitmapfiles and assigned to their respective material slots.
Features:
Autodetection of map names in layered PSD files.
Versioning
Configurable with ‘textfiles’
Photoshop Template Helpers
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Georg Duemlein aka RDG developed this tool.
Anselm v. Seher-Thoß aka PsychoSilence was the advisor in this project.
Last but not least we’d like to thank Keith Boshoff (Wahooney) whose PSD2Material was the cornerstone for developing this tool.
I actually had the same workflow idea (Assigning PSD files to materials and maps) for the GhostPainter - PSD Layers Utility. But GhostPainter doesn’t offer to convert the PSD into another file format before the assignment (but it supports assigning to any material type and composite maps).
What I didn’t understand was the following sentence on the PSD2Mat website > We could use the complete PSD as a bitmap in all available maps slots. But this results in a huge memory footprint especially if you are using many PSD Files on objects in numbers.that assigning a PSD directly in 3ds max would require more memory then assigning a converted file. This doesn’t make sense to me, because not the complete file is kept in memory but only the image data itself.
his doesn’t make sense to me, because not the complete file is kept in memory but only the image data itself.
Well, this is a statement made by my Advisor Anselm, I didn’t double check it. I could imagine that it is maybe *faster* if the maps are presplit than having the renderer loading huge PSDfiles and extracting the wanted map date, especially if you don’t use all of the available layers …
Yeah I heard of Ghostpainter. In my current state of freelancing it is more efficient to spend some time in write such a tool than spending money on just another commercial plugin.
For the additional features and supported maps:
PSD2Mat is a strict pipeline tool. It cannot and won’t offer you the freedom a plugin written for the masses.
This approach has several benefits:
The time needed for training your artist is reasonable less as there less features.
You can adapt it to your pipeline and just offer the features your pipeline requires: no need to double check this illiterate shad0r gladiat0r who won’t get that there are no composite or IOR maps in your pipeline :?
You can set the way the layers are mapped: “rudi”-> “Diffuse” or even “bump” → “diffuse” + “specular” …
And it offers a basic backup system
I would like to ask if there is a way to save the rendered image as PSD and then when opening in Photoshop to have different layers for the different materials? It would be great also!
I edited my last post - as it was very weird - am sorry for that.
cebas PSDmanager(?) splits rendered images into render elements for photoshop. I sure has material id support.
My Mat2PSD handles ‘just’ materials and splits maps into photoshop layers.
I just started coding today and there is no download available yet.
But I try to get it finished
)