Is it possible to access the bitmap created by a falloff Shadow / Light texture? I tried renderMap, but it only works for perpendicular / parallel and towards / away? For shadow / light I just get a black map. Is there some other method for getting the amount of light on an object?
Thanks in advance.
If your model has uvws setup, you could do a render to texture and just choose lighting.
If you’re trying to get the lighting solution in the scene, for using as a cubic map or light probe, you’d need to capture the light striking a sphere. There is a mental ray camera lens shader that can capture to cubic formats like vertical cross and strip. Those methods are more involved though.
Could you explain in more detail what you’re trying to obtain?
-Dave
Sound like either the UV’s are not layed out in 0-1 space with no overlapping, or your using an unsupported 3rd party renderer.
I tested the falloff map and it worked for me. Other ways to achive the same lighting information results:
[ul]
[li]rendering the LightingMap in Render To Texture[/li][li]a selfIlluminated texture with a gradientRamp texture in the diffuseMap slot with the Gradient Type set to Lighting[/li][/ul]
Thanks for the help guys. I just tried using a gradientRamp set to lighting and same results, renderMap gives me a blank image. Blue, when you said you tested a falloff: you were you able to get the shadow / light information as a bitmat in maxscript? The other falloff types work for me, but not shadow / light.
What I’m trying to do is write scripted material that mimics the style of crosshatching in architectural etching. The first image “testEtching” is what I have so far, it uses slots in a composite material that are each banded with a falloff map. It looks, ok, but if you look closely at the borders between bands, you see that the lines fade out. What i really want is for the lines to taper out as in the second image “goodEtching”, a blowup from a real architectural etching.
So… my thinking was I could draw the lines algorithmically, setting their thickness based on how much light is on the surface. But, to do this, i need to know how much light is on the surface at a given moment.
Does this make any sense…?
Any help on how to get the amount of light on the object would be great.
Not through script, but through the Render To Texture panel directly to ensure that the map could be created. Which did work just fine with the falloff type Shadow/Light set in the falloff map. So can you create a texture via the panel but not through script?
I’m not using render to texture (which works fine). I’m using the renderMap function in the materials editor which I now see doesn’t work for the shadow/light falloff via the materials editor either.
Ahh, so i now see that Render Map doesn’t work the way I expected. It’s just for the previews in the editor and has nothing to do with the geometry of the object it’s on or the lights in the scene (so shadow/light returns a solid color because there’s no light in a texture map preview) …
So, to my original issue. Is there any way in maxScript to write a procedural texture map that uses the light/shadow values as part of it’s input, or am I relegated to writing an mr shader (which is a new can of worms for me…)?