3ds Max Quicktip: iray and material editors

When using the GPU accelerated render engine, iRay & either material editor, I would recommend swopping the material renderer to use mental ray.

The purpose of this is to Increase mat editor performance. With SLATE (the node-based material editor added in version 2011) you have an unlimited amount of swatches. Its important to remember each swatch is a fully rendered sphere, to allow for accurate representation when creating materials. As such a rendering overhead is incurred in any of the material editors. This is more so, when using SLATE, becuase of this aforementioned benefit it brings, in its ability to have an unlimited amount of materials. This is incontrast to the original material editor, or ‘Compact’ as its now called, which had a previous limit of 32. This does mean however your graphics card, can take a hit in performance, due to it being used to render the swatches. (Looking in the bottom left corner of the SLATE GUI will inform you what stage SLATE has got to in the rendering process. Shown below.)

There is an easy way to ensure you increase your interactivity by following the below steps.

1. Open the Render settings dialogue box by pressing F10, and navigate to the bottom ‘Assign Renderer’ group.

2. Toggle the ‘Lock to current renderer option’ off

3. The ‘Material Editor’ field will now become available, and no longer greyed-out.

From here choose the below icon.

4. and choose mental ray as the renderer.

This now means you mental ray will be used in your material editors for rendering the swatches/previews. Inturn freeing up soem resources. This simple workflow, shows the flexibility that 3ds Max brings to your  workflow.

Whilst talking about SLATE and material previews, its worth knowing you can also quickly toggle (disable/enable) the rendering of the swatches by clicking on the teapot icon, shown below. This is a ‘global’ option and will build a queue of swatches it will render, once enabled. Again helping performance, if your scene contains hundreds of material previews and, for example, you are simply amending bitmaps.

 

Courtesy: Jamie Gwilliam, Autodesk UK