From the course: V-Ray Next for 3ds Max Essential Training

V-Ray Triplanar - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: V-Ray Next for 3ds Max Essential Training

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V-Ray Triplanar

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- Another important map type available in V-Ray Next is the Triplanar map that was added in version 3.3 of the engine. To show how this works, we have a sculpted dog's head model in our scene. Which if I just open up the material browser using the M key and then jump into the dog bust tab, we can see has a V-Ray material applied with a wood bitmap plugged into the diffuse slot. Which, whilst perhaps not the most common material for this type of sculpt, is one that helps us see how the triplanar map can be very useful at times. Now the interesting thing about this particular version of our head model is that it has had all of it's UVW mapping info removed. And so if I go ahead and start an interactive render session using, in this instance the V-Ray Next GPU engine, you can see that all we get is a homogenous color with none of the wood detail in the bitmap showing up at all. Which could be one of the situations we find ourselves in Especially if we have received a model close to a critical deadline only to find out at the last instant that no UV mapping work has been done. Or worse still that UV work has been done, but done so badly as to make it unusable for a final render. Now of course we do have the option in max of just quickly applying a UVW map modifier. let's jump into the modify tab and do just that. Of course, the default projection of planar mapping is pretty much useless on a model such as this. Even when projected from the camera's point of view, and so let's switch over to box. in the background of a shot perhaps even being out of focus, then this mapping would possibly be okay. For anything more than that however, Enter, the triplanar map. Coming back to the material editor then, let's do a search for V-Ray TR let's do a search for V-Ray TR and then drag a V-Ray triplanar map from the sorted list onto the work area. To test it out, we will of course need to connect the color correct map that we have here to the texture input, and then add the triplanar map to the diffuse input on our V-Ray material. The color correct map here being used to brighten the mid tones on the wood image a little, as it was a bit dark in the render for my taste. What we see now is that we have definitely made a difference to the look of the texture, with perhaps the most immediate problem being that the scale of the wood grain is now completely different. Which actually isn't surprising seeing as V-Ray is now ignoring the tiling control on the bitmap node, and is instead controlling the scaling of the texture by means of this size parameter on the triplanar map. Which if we set to about 18, will give us a similar scale to before, although we can of course alter this to suit. So let's say something like 14 in order to make the grain look finer. Now of course something else has happened here in that with the triplanar map plugged into the material, the UVW map that we assigned in max is now being completely ignored in favor of the triplanar controls. Just something to keep in mind as it can potentially catch us out if we're not careful. To take a look at how the triplanar controls work, probably the best thing we can do is drag out another instance of it, add three V-Ray color nodes to the mix, and then after setting pure red, green, and blue colors for them, plug them into the three texture inputs on the triplanar node, and then plug that into the materials diffuse slot. Although we maybe surprised to see only a single color showing up in the render, which is happening because in the triplanar controls, we are currently set to use the same texture for all three axes. If we switch that over to different texture on each axes though, we can clearly see how things are working. Now we do see in the render that we don't just have red, green, and blue colors showing up. As in the transition areas we also have cyan, yellow, and magenta which you will probably recognize as being secondary colors in the RGB spectrum which isn't an accident of course as the blending that the triplanar map is doing in order to hide the various projection seams is creating this effect. The default blend value of 0.1 produces a fairly small blend area as you can see, but if we crank this up to the max of one, we now see a much broader set of transitions taking place. To finish things off then, let's plug our original triplanar map back into the materials diffuse slot and set it's blend value to about 0.65. What we see now as we compare to our box mapped version, What we see now as we compare to our box mapped version, which we can do by simply bypassing the triplanar map which we can do by simply bypassing the triplanar map in the material, in the material, is that we now have much less obvious seams in our render. is that we now have much less obvious seams in our render.

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