3ds Max Custom Shaders

The topics in this section describe custom shaders for use with the mental ray renderer, and 3ds Max.

Material Editor > Material/Map Browser > Maps > mental ray > Pick a mental ray shader other than an NVIDIA library shader or a lume shader.

Note: mental ray shaders appear in the Browser only if the active renderer supports them.

Topics in this section

3D Displacement Shader (mental ray)
The 3D Displacement shader displaces the geometry of surfaces. The effect is similar to the Displacement map component of a standard material. You can apply mental ray displacement to any kind of object, unlike the standard Displacement map, which is restricted to surface models (meshes, patches, polys, and NURBS surfaces).
Glare Shader (mental ray)
The Glare shader, when used as a camera output shader, creates a halo around very bright areas in the rendered image. It’s applied in two dimensions after rendering, so it can partially obscure darker objects between the bright area and the camera for greater realism.
Height Map Displacement Shader (mental ray)
The Height Map Displacement shader displaces the geometry of surfaces, and is specifically intended for use with height maps generated by normal maps; see Creating and Using Normal Bump Maps.
Material to Shader (mental ray)
Lets you use a regular 3ds Max material as a mental ray shader. Depending on the component to which this shader is assigned (Surface, Shadow, Displacement, Volume, and so on), the mental ray renderer uses the appropriate material component.
mr Labeled Element Shader (mental ray)
The mr Labeled Element shader doesn’t actually function as a shader, but instead works in conjunction with the mr Labeled Element render element to let you output any branch of a shader tree (a string of nested maps) as a render element. For example, if you use the Checker map as a diffuse map, and you use a Perlin Marble map as one of the two checker colors, you can render only the checker-map components that contain the marble map to a custom element for subsequent compositing.
Multi/Sub-Map Shader (mental ray)
The Multi/Sub-Map shader provides the ability to assign different colors or maps to a single parameter of a material. For example, you could create an array of pebbles on a terrain and assign a single Arch & Design material to all of the pebbles. To introduce color variation, place a Multi/Sub-Map shader in the Diffuse slot of the material. In doing so, you would maintain the same BRDF properties for all pebbles, varying only the diffuse color. Judicious use of Multi/Sub-Map can vastly reduce the required number of materials in complex scenes.
Object Color Shader (mental ray)
The Object Color shader lets you use the object’s wireframe color as a map or shader in any material. You can use the color or a single channel of it (red, green, or blue) as is, or modify the color with two other colors or maps depending on its intensity.
Shader List Shaders (mental ray)
The Shader List shaders provide an interface for constructing mental ray shader lists. A shader list combines the effect of multiple shaders: Each shader is called in turn, the first one's output being treated as input to the next, and so on.

Parent topic: mental ray Shaders