topic Layer RGBA Tutorial or even a decent user manual page - and other gripes in Arnold for 3ds Max Forum

Layer RGBA Tutorial or even a decent user manual page - and other gripes

mpowers — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 10:06:07 GMT

I am sick of the poor or missing support for MaxToA. How about more tutorials related to MAX? I don't want to see Maya or C4D tutorials - which use different interfaces and sometimes methods. I certainly don't want the explanation on the user manual to say the blending modes "emulate all of Nuke and Photoshop's modes" - FYI if I am using 3ds MAX, a reference to Nuke is most likely useless.

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Layer+RGBA is one of the worst help pages I have ever read for helping someone unfamiliar with how something functions. How about attaching some real-world shader tree examples and explanations, maybe even a tutorial???

After 2 hours of searching I found something helpful, but of course Solid Angle had nothing to do with it:

https://youtu.be/0utXpKHRYFo

Does Autodesk really own you? If so, why is the MaxToA support so poor? You are hindering the adoption of Arnold by MAX users. To network render noice.exe denoising, I had to write my own python to segmented batch file script. I bet one your coders could have written and published it in 3-4 hours. And your licensing process...

Sincerely,

Annoyed

Re: Layer RGBA Tutorial or even a decent user manual page - and other gripes

Stephen.Blair — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 16:22:52 GMT

Yes, we can improve the layer shader docs. Something more like this would be good:

https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/8.0/content/user_guide/merging/merge_operations.html

Also, the order of the layers should be clarified, and we're looking at that now. We just added an example render tree to help, on the 3ds Max Layer RGBA page:

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AF3DSUG/Layer+RGBA

We reference Nuke and Photoshop because we didn't invent these blending modes, we provide modes common in other popular applications, like Nuke and Photoshop.

https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/blending-modes-explained/

Many of the blend modes are also covered on wikipedia:

Re: Layer RGBA Tutorial or even a decent user manual page - and other gripes

maxtarpini — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 16:57:16 GMT

But you even provide formulas and results .. not sure any docs will ever be completely idiot proof :))

Re: Layer RGBA Tutorial or even a decent user manual page - and other gripes

CiroCardoso3v — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 17:13:08 GMT

For me the Arnold Docs is one of the best. Similar to the Vray ones. Translating the knowledge from Maya to Max is basically seamless, at least for me.

Re: Layer RGBA Tutorial or even a decent user manual page - and other gripes

Stephen.Blair — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 22:29:01 GMT

I've removed your Covid comment and the "OMFG", both of which were inappropriate. Please keep it civil and professional.