Ambient lighting with physical material

[Anonymous]

So recently I've been experimenting with physical materials in Max 2017, but I've encountered an annoying problem: Physical materials being present cause the ambient lighting to be jet black, even though i have it set to be RGB 200, 200, 200. This affects the entire model while in the viewport, and when rendered, it affects the parts of the model that use physical materials. In the pictures, all the parts of the head use physical materials. This makes the model way too dark and makes it impossible to make a render with good lighting.

How do I fix this?

[Daf]

Hi,

Are you using maps for your textures? How did you generate those maps? What type of lighting or environment did you use to do so? What type of lighting are you using now? What renderer are you using?

You are probably going to get the best results with the physical material using the ART renderer and HDRI lighting. Might want to read up a bit more on PBR so the experimenting doesn't get  too frustrating.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=3ds+max+physical+materials+and+HDRI

Daf

[Anonymous]

Hi Daf,

I will take a look at that, but to answer your questions:

I'm a bit confused on what you mean by "how did I generate those maps", but if you mean what I think you mean, most of the textures are simple bitmaps. The bump maps are a normal bump map node with a normal texture in the appropriate slot, but those are the only exceptions. I do not have any special lights in the scene besides default lights, and the same issue occurs when I remove them. I did not do anything special to the environment and I'm using the default renderer.

[Anonymous]

Also, I saw some YouTube comment about self-illumination not working in the ART renderer. Should I be concerned about that?

[Anonymous]

TO BE CLEAR, I want to be able to have a not-dark ambient light so that I can render bright scenes without having to create any lights. I was able to do this before the problem by making the ambient light color lighter, but as I said before, that doesn't work anymore.

[Daf]

Hi,

Bit of an unconventional workflow so I'm afraid I'm not going to be as helpful.  If you are using the default (Scanline?) renderer with the Physical Materials I can imagine that that is where the issue is. They are not meant to work together.The reason I asked about the origin of the texture maps is that if you are using something like Substance Painter or Mari you can generate more appropriate maps for the Standard Material. Instead of the metal/rough workflow you can convert to the standard spec/glossiness workflow - thus your ambient light will work as expected.

Let's see if one of our other  members can step in and help.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I would appreciate that, thank you!

For now, how do I use the substance painter?

[Anonymous]

Also, you may be onto something-the ambient light appears to work as intended on the skin material after i've removed the roughness map!