I was hoping someone could give me some information regarding the ability to render a normalbump render element through Mental Ray and MAX.  So far I’ve only been successful doing this when rendering with Vray and using all Vray materials.  Most of my scenes however are built from Mental Ray materials and I’m trying to avoid needing to make the painful conversion.

I can render a normalmap element pass through a render layer preset within Maya so I’m scratching my head as to why I can’t find it in MAX. If not through a Render Element, is there another means of achieving this? My goal is to be able to render this element for future lighting tweaks within After Effects. Thanks in advance!

Yes it can, but not with Render Elements. Here’s how:

Create a material in the Material Editor with in the diffuse a Ambient/Reflective Occlusion shader (only when MR is on)
Then change Type into 2 if you need a worldspace normal or 3 (yes, it’s not written down there) for a tangentspace normal.
Then make the material 100% self-illuminating and go to your render dialog in the processing-tab to enable Material Override and link the new material to that slot.

Push Render

http://www.3dhype.com

Sadly it works only in 2010 or earlier. 2011 has a new AO shader layout where you aren’t able to change the number, you can choose only some. It had a feature, and they ignore it in my opinion.

http://www.3dhype.com

3ddy 13 August 2010 12:07 PM

Sadly it works only in 2010 or earlier. 2011 has a new AO shader layout where you aren’t able to change the number, you can choose only some. It had a feature, and they ignore it in my opinion.

The original/older version is probably just hidden.  Therefore users should be able to unhide the ‘old’ shader(s) and use it or just save the one from an older version of 3ds Max into a .mat file and load it into 2011.

Jeff Patton
My Website | mental ray materials & blog

Hey, nice workaround, but I found another way.

In the new Slate Editor there is still an option to fill in a float. How nice!

http://www.3dhype.com

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Thanks guys. This is particularly helpful for me also, as I am trying to use the technique used in the Toxic Robin Hood tutorial.

http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/toxik_robin_hood

Hi

I’m trying to get a worldspace render pass going. I’m wanting to do a PositionToPoints in Nuke.

In max 2012 the type togel in the AO shader wont let me chose 3 even in the slate.

Any ideas?

Max 2011, Win 7 64, 12gb, 980x, NVIDIA Quadro FX3800.

Try to connect a Controller bezier float to the type. That will fix it.

http://www.3dhype.com