Hello, I'm having a few problems, one is getting changes in material settings to show up in the viewports, and second trying to get the imported objects to shine in the viewports. I know it looks complicated. I have messed with a few settings like Rendering and Viewport settings. I am new to 3DSMax trying to set up my viewports and am looking for a simply guide but can't find one. I'm hoping there is one. I have another program called 3DSimed that imports objects with there material properties as they are that is all the textures and shader properties or specular colours, etc. set as they are. Also DX9 shader programs are already loaded so you can see the object shine and reflect light. I am wondering why 3DSMax doesn't do the same. Or if you have to set it up first and how hard it is to do. Can anyone please offer some advice if there is a simple method or know of a good tutorial because I don't quite know what to look for. Thanks.
3DS Max doesn't actually use the gMotor shaders. About the only thing you can do is view the texture maps on the models with basic diffuse lighting. The Viewer allows you to tweak specular settings from within the game engine, using MatProps panel. So you can adjust the numbers how you like 'em, then go back to Max and set them to the same numbers and re-export (I believe they're only temporary settings in the Viewer, and don't get saved back to the .gmt's). 3DSimEd is only using an approximation of the in-engine shaders (especially since it uses OpenGL as opposed to DirectX). You might be able to get a rough idea with it, but it's best to do final tweaking in-engine under different lighting conditions. Also, make sure you're using the standard Max renderer and not Mental Ray, otherwise you won't be able to see anything at all in the Material Editor or in the viewports.
Isn't there a way of loading the gMotor shaders into 3dsmax? the d3d9.dll into 3DS Max 2010\mental ray\shaders_3rdparty\?
There may be a way to get the shaders to work in Max, but a.) I think you'd have to do some coding, and b.) such a solution may not work with the GMT exporter. They definitely won't work with Mental Ray, though. The shaders for Mental Ray are written specifically for Mental Ray, and don't use HLSL, therefore won't work with DirectX. The shader previews in the material editor actually use whatever renderer you have set; so, when you have Mental Ray active, it's actually using the Mental Ray code to render the material previews, not DirectX. Conversely, whatever you see in the viewport is using whatever you have set in your preferences (typically DirectX, but with newer versions a lot of people use Nitrous). So, if there isn't a DirectX proxy for your Mental Ray materials, then you don't see anything; and even if there is a proxy, it definitely is not 100% accurate WYSIWYG. Even if you could get them to display 'something' in Max, it would be a rough approximation at best--you wouldn't have the HDR and the lighting that you'd get in-engine; so you'd gain a half a step at best at the expense of a considerable amount of work.
3d max have DX material, if you have the shader in fx format can use to see in viewport. I do some fx shades to simulate gmotormaterial works, but MAX get unstable.
