The Leatherback (WIP THREAD)

nope, before i use a fresnel map i want to track down a good max shader that will let me load it in. does sketchfab view with fresnel map on?

i am not comfortable in make a map that i can not text view at least semi accurately. so i'll probably look into it a bit more. its listed as optional. so unless i can find something quickly tonight before i view i'll prob skip it on this one. never on any of the over dozen games that i've worked on has fresnel maps been something that was used.

I think sketchfab does, ill look in my libary for a renderer for Max.

It supports fresnels (Sketchfab)

hmm looking in sketchfab now i see
diffuse
light map
specular
shininess
normal
opacity
emission

none of these work like a fresnel map. Where are you guys seeing a place for fresnel?

Use shininess

well that would be the wrong thing since a shininess / gloss map is a completely different thing than a fresnel map.

acording to sketchfab faq

• Shininess - This slot controls the sharpness of the specular map, and higher settings make the materialglossier. You can only select a texture not a color, if you select a color it will disable the texture. If you don’t use the texture only the factor will affect the rendering.

this is a typical gloss map / shine map spot which i have made hundreds... thousands off in it you make different values for different materials of your object and it controlls the fall off of the specular.
a fresnel map is completely different and works off of view angle. involving a seperate gradient map (usually loaded in seperatly per game or specific area of the game)

I am not an authority on fresnel maps, but based on my conversations with Covic what they want in a fresnel map is a grey scal map that controls the gloss. Today for the first time I put a fresnel map into Sketchfab for the first time and I couldn't figure it out either so I tried shininess and I got the result I was anticipating. SOE will put the color band in for our fresnels AFAIK.

they do similar things but in different ways, you got a result because a fresnel and a gloss map look extremely similar. and sketchfab was just using it as a gloss.

https://forums.station.sony.com/pla...t-and-execution.11500057920/#post-11500325965 this thread talks about the fresnel maps, which works.. sorta kinda like an environment map.. but differently. you may get fine results in sketchfab using the shine map slot, but it will definitely be different results. in fact most every game I've worked on used gloss instead of fresnel. except for very special circumstances. when i get home tonight i will look for a way to view fresnel in max its probably in there i just haven'tused it yet.

If you figure things out let us know

This is looking great. Submit and I will almost definitely approve it.

Dave

awesome, thanks for the vote of confidence covic! packing everything up now!

and for others it seems the Xoliul shader for max allows you to view fresnel maps in max viewport. i'm going try it out for my screen shot for this submision let you know how it works
http://viewportshader.com/

Keep in mind the Viewport shader from Xoliul can really drain computer power when its running, it does work though!

i've never had any performance issues with xoliul, but i have a fairly beefy machine. but i could not seem to get the fresnal map (loaded in the reflection slot) to mask the fresnel gradient amount. will play with it a bit later.

leatherback is officialy submitted for eq2, prepping it for eq1 now

I still have much to learn. I didn't back my AO's though so that may be a point of difference. Not sure. Thanks for the links on texture tutorials though I will be checking those out.

I had the same issue with that viewport renderer, it just has a hard time with fresnal map. Im still playing with it though.