Working with Max Interactive and Vray

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I'm really attracted to the idea of working inside Max Interactive. I'll be working in 3ds Max with V-ray, but my question is how can I get my V-ray materials to Max Interactive?

What's the "perfect world" situation Autodesk is trying to build for us? Do we bounce an LVMD file out of Revit Live, compile the project in Max Interactive, and work between Max and Max Interactive to enhance the look? Or do we just link the RVT file into Max and "send all" to Max Interactive? I want to utilize Max Interactive for immersive VR experiences, but what's the workflow here? Has anyone done it yet? I know Max Interactive is still very new, but it claims to support V-ray materials (source) so bringing up my issues here is really the only way to get past them.

There is a Max Interactive video tutorial series here, which I plan on watching asap, but based on the titles it doesn't seem to explain this process.

Neoscape appears to have done a pretty impressive job with Max Interactive, but no easily attainable answers as to what their process was.

And lastly, there's another forum post here about using Max's scene converter for basic materials, but often times Revit objects have generic materials with diffuse, specular, cutout transparent textures, etc. and I haven't gotten the scene converter to work for these cases.

Thanks.

[electrotoast_old]

Hi @Anonymous and welcome to the forum! If you have a scene already set up with Vray materials and you use the Send All to 3ds Max Interactive. They should go across without you needing to do anything. There's some caveats to that with support for specialty vray materials like car paint or SSS materials, but if the majority of your content is using the VrayMTL, you shouldn't have any issues. You will need to make sure you've started with one of the VR template projects as well.

If you're wanting to just check scale of your scene in VR, you could apply a simple gray Physical Material to everything and send it over to 3ds Max Interactive.

With regards to the Scene Converter, do you have an example of what your issue is? You should be able to set up your own rules on how to handle those types of materials.

[Anonymous]

Hey @electrotoast_old

Currently I'm having issues with the last step in this workflow:

1. Link RVT file in 3ds Max and combining entities by material, most materials come through and link the png textures found in Autodesk's shared material folder that Revit uses

2. Right-click command to use V-ray's scene converter, which works for most of the materials. As expected, it converts the generic materials to V-ray materials and links those same Autodesk shared texture files to corresponding slots

3. Connect to Max Interactive and use Level Send All, checking everything on the list except update existing assets, update materials, update textures, and combine meshes

4. (here's the issue) Model is imported into Max Interactive and it's all combined as one mesh (despite combine meshes on export being unchecked), a materials folder is created with roughly 90 materials in it and they're all basic Max Interactive materials, no textures anywhere, and the only value on all those materials that's different is the base color for a few of them.

Currently I'm just working with the Revit Architecture Sample Project in 3ds Max and the HTC Vive Template Project in Max Interactive.

Edit: This response is from my work Autodesk account and not my personal one that I used to start this thread.

[electrotoast_old]

@Anonymous Thanks for the detailed explanation. For just a test, can you try merging the link in and then do a Level Send All? I'm wondering if there's an issue with the the file being linked.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@electrotoast_old That seemed to resolve the issue with all the objects being combined on import... I think I may have figured it out, but it raises another question.

I first had to run 3ds Max's Scene Converter to convert all Autodesk Materials to Standard Materials, and then run V-ray scene converter to convert the newly-created Standard Materials to V-ray Materials (see list of what v-ray converter is capable of converting here). And, voila! I successfully transferred the entire Arch Sample project into Max Interactive with minimal hiccups.

My second question is regarding how to further reduce those hiccups. There are significantly less texture options for Max Interactive materials than there are 3ds Max's VRayMtl. Specifically, Max Interactive has Color, Normal, Bump, Glossiness, Emissive, and Opacity (opacity for transparent parent resource only). Whereas VRayMtl in 3ds Max has close to 20 texture slots available. I'm wondering if you know exactly how Max Interactive hooks these textures up for you? Which 3ds Max VrayMtl texture slots get "looked at" when transferring to Max Interactive?