Procedural Noise map - size clarification?

[darawork]

Hi, forgive me if I'm being unnecessarily pedantic.

It states in the manual that: "Size: Sets the scale of the noise function, in 3ds Max units. Default=25.0"

If my system units are milimeters, what does '25' equate to in real life?

I've never really understood the relationship of units to real life in several spinner locations in Max.

Sometimes I feel like they are just plucked from thin air, you either know what to set it or don't, there is no logical rule involved.

Thanks 🙂

[soulburn · Accepted solution]

Sounds like this is less a noise question and more a units question. If Units are in cm, and you have 25 units, then that means 25 cm. if you set a unit to be millimeters, that means 25 units means 25 millimeters. Since there is no procedural noise in real life, the size of the noise indeed is an arbitrary decision. So best to just twiddle the value until you see the results you're after.

- Neil

[darawork]

Thanks for the reply, yeah I just spun the spinner until it looked right. I was just trying to add bump noise to a counter top material. The bumps are about 1mm in real life so 1unit looked fine. Was kinda obvious in the end.

[nuno_moser]

This is something that I was wondering for a long time. The relation of the noise units with the system units.
The only thing I hate about the noise map is that what you see on the material editor is usually not the size you will see on the render therefore difficult to get to the result I'm afer