Noise Map not displaying in viewport. Please Help...

[Anonymous]

Dear fellow 3ds Maxers,

I teach an after-school 3ds max class and am having a frustrating little proble. When I take a standard material and apply a noise map to the Bump it only shows in the preview sphere of the slate material editor and not in the viewport. When I switch the viewport to realistic with maps and materials, I get a strange camouflage pattern.

I run Max 2013 student version, Windows 7 64bit and have an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 240 graphics card.

I have attached a picture to better depict.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

[RobH2]

What does the render look like? Is it noise or the camo pattern?

I've run into this before too where the intereactive display does not match what I am applying. But, if the render looks good then it's just an inconvenience. Now, if you are doing screen captures as your final output, that's an issue. But 99.999% of the time, it's probalby renders that are the end product.

You might try swithing away from the Nitrous Display Driver to see if that's the issue. Maybe Direct3D will display the viewport correctly. I can't remember what they are right now but there are a few other random functions that don't work well with Nitrous.

I just tested it here with a Standard Material and an A&D Material and both looked like noise in my preview. Neither looked like camo. Try the driver switch and report back.

[Anonymous]

In general I assume that no material will ever look correct in the viewport, and then I'm never disappointed :0 You may want to check my texmapPreview script: http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm I use it to do fast renders of patterns in materials so I can see the result faster than doing a full render.

- Neil

[RobH2]

Wow Neil, that's a huge assortment of scripts. I'm going to check them out. Thanks for letting us know they are there....

[RobH2]

Some really handy scripts there. I like 'imagePlaneMaker' as I build from ortho photos a lot. Nice...

[Anonymous]

No problem. Hope you find a lot of the useful.

- Neil