Hi guys. I guess this is my first post here.

So, I'm Aurel Manea and lead 3d studio artist for Gameloft studio in Romania and Eastern Europe, but technically I'm more on the technical side of the 3d realm.
This is my first attempt of a shader that is no work specific and tries to fill a void that I found in the realtime shader world for 3d max.
That is a shader that is the equivalent of Xoliul for prebaked lightmap based scenes.

Why ? Because I found that the result while rendering with v-ray are much better than any global illumination engine for Unreal or Unity.

It is made with shader FX as I don't have enough knowledge or pacience for something this much

You can find out more and download it along with a sample scene from my website:

http://www.aurelm.com/envo/

Hey this is cool man! I'm wondering, have you solved the issue of normalmaps and specular? Biggest issue I saw with that was requiring special bakes to be able to do those two...

Cool! Added to the wiki.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryShaders

Hi and thank you for the quick reply.
What is the problem you are talking about ? You mean the issue when working with lightmaps that you need to store the light normals in another map ?
If so, no, I did not even concern myself with it.

Definitely going to try this out

Xoliul... radiosity normal mapping?

Also thank you Eric for adding the shader to the Wiki

Regarding the Normal Maps the shader mostly uses normal maps for the cubemaps, the extra light (lights soon) are just a cherry on top that I'm not sure it's necessary.
Yes, it's true you don't feel the light as with directional lightmaps, but for the usual artist I don't think it's a problem. That is in my domain that for now regards mobile platforms (Ipad, iphone) we are not quite there yet and there would not be enough memory for this or per pixel gpu power.
And I don't think there is another way to have proper specular and per pixel light wiith lightmaps unfortunately. Even if there would be I think the overheaad for an artist would be too much as I don't think any of the major rendering engines available for 3ds max supports directional lightmaps. I may be wrong and if so I might start experimenting with them.

Mother of Shaders! This is awesome!

One question, how is the performance? I tried creating an Uber-Enviroment shader in Max not too long ago, but the scene lagged like crazy, how did you solve that?

Hi.
Well to be honest at home I have an ancient nvidia gtx 270 and did not have any performance viewing and walking around the scene. Working with it and trying to model and unwrap while having the shader active on a big piece of geometry is another problem and the scene will lag like hell with any hlsl shader. I think it's because of the way max handles directx shaders.
However the shader is not optimized in any way as it is the brute unoptimized code Shader FX gives and if someone were to go through it could probably get half the cycle count it has not (and I don't know what it is now ) . But as long as you don't keep too many polygons/materials in the same object should be ok on any midrange pc.
ps: The scene might lag for a lot of reasons. For example I had to drop the tga textures for DDS ones because using big tga files filled my video card memory in an instance .
Forcing anisotropic filtering to something like 16x in the video card driver is also a performance killer.

Noors figured out how to make directional lightmaps work in 3ds Max, if you're interested.
How to ? Directional lightmaps with 3dsMax/Vray

Wow, thank you, I am very interested for more than 1 reason and does not look very difficult at all (well except the 3x render times ).
I will experiment and see if I can gate a base working scene with directional lightmaps and after try and implement it in the shader.
I also have a list of my own features to add, like special glass shaders that do multiple lookups to generate depth scratches. And also an all-in-one postprocessing shader for 3d lut based color correction, vignetting, bloom etc.

Post-Process is going to be tricky since it sometimes doesn't work for certain versions and Max doesn't sample the scene correctly or at all last I checked when I was creating my water shader, so stuff like refraction for glass, etc will require you use Cubemaps.

Kinda sucks, but I'm very interested to see what you can do.

Nice to see that there's much love for environment scene on 3dsmax. Been searching for this, thank you very much for sharing. 3dsmax 2012 had more crash than 2011 when opening your scene.

It crashes ?
Unfortunately I only have 3dsmax 2011 and 2013 installed so could not confirm. Can you give more details about your system ?

Ace-Angel, When using scene effect loader it seems max samples the scene just fine, at least the examples found in maps/fx/scene work and managed to do a modified version of the bloom one. And I'm very sure that a couple of years ago I saw a max scene that sampled the scene inside an object shader and had realtime refraction for water.
I don't think there is any way to have acces to the z-buffer so something like depth of field will not work.
But my knowledge of hlsl is very limited when trying to write something from scratch, I guess it's something I have to work on.

Hi aurelm, here's my PC spec at work:
- 3dsmax 2011 and 2012 x86/32bit
- 4Gb Ram
- Intel i5 2.8Ghz
- Nvidia GTS 450

I tried to import the mesh to a fresh scene and it still crashed when I saved [especially when I import the trees]. I will try it on a 64bit machine back home and see if that works ^__^

3dmaxter, you issue is 90% the very low amount of ram on your computer. You probably have windows 7 and that also uses up 50-70% of your existing ram.

Anyway, I did some tests and manage to get directional lightmaps working using noors method (Thanks Eric). It was trivial since shaderfx already has a node for that. However I think that was it for the shadee and the scene is starting to become unusable . However the results are very nice.

Very cool !!

Originally Posted by aurelm

3dmaxter, you issue is 90% the very low amount of ram on your computer. You probably have windows 7 and that also uses up 50-70% of your existing ram.

Hi aurelm, yes that might be the problem, I tried the scene on my 64bit rig and the scene runs very well without any crash, so it might be software related.

- 3dsmax 2012 x64
- 4Gb Ram
- AMD Phenom 3.2Ghz
- Nvidia 9600 GT

I rebaked the lightmap using the method described by Noors and the result is much better than expected. Also I took the bloom shader that comes with Max and rewrote part of it to be more simple and work with alpha also.

Hi again. I updated the page and added a beta version download
http://www.aurelm.com/envo/
The beta and scene has working directional lightmaps.
And in the next version I hope that it will also have specular from the irradiance
And thanks everyone for the feedback and help, I credited you.
-Aurel

Nice man ! HL2 in max
Glad to know i've been of some help.
You made a typo on "ressources" on the page you've linked.

Hey Aurelm!
First thanks for your work !

I am currently using your shader for an art test and i am facing a problem with fog.

It seems that the fog is not based on pixel depth in my scene.
When i enable fog in the material it just adds a color layer on the meshes and it's not fading away when i get closer.

I tried to play with the near/far parameters but it's doing nothing.

Any idea why it doesn't work correctly ?
It works fine in the exemple scene btw ...

edit : Problem solved, just had to attach all my meshes together ! stupid me...