Mental Ray and Illumination.

InfinitySquared

Okay, so I am using 3DS Max 9 32Bit. I am using the Mental Ray renderer and I have unlocked the Lumes Shaders while following a Phaser tutorial.

Now I want to make a material that also illuminates its surroundings so that I can make proper drives.

Melak

Does Max 9 have the Arch&Design material?

You can check the base.mi file for the "Light Utils" section, or the architectural_max.mi for "mia_light_surface", but I'm pretty sure the feature to illuminate the scene with a material was added in Max 2008, sorry.


What you could try is make the material very self illuminating (very high intensity), turn on final Gather and GI, it might complain about no photon emitters, but it should smooth out the lighting.

The object will still be blown out white though.

InfinitySquared

Yeah, Max9 has Arch and Design.

Melak

sorry, I edited my post quite alot in the last few minutes, maybe something in there can help?

InfinitySquared

Hm, I've found "mia_light_surface" and the Light Utils section. What now?

Melak

Do this,


then, put a mib_blackbody map into the Diffuse of a standard material, make it 100% self illuminating and set a high intensity for the blackbody map, and set the temperature to something between 3600-9300.

Enable Final Gather, enable Global Illumination and that should just about do it.

InfinitySquared

Yay it works! Thanks! Mods may now lock this thread.