Diffuse Texture Resolution in Max Viewport

[sevware]

After getting past all the posted issues of using GMT export and actually seeing it in the viewer, I'm still a bit curious if there is a way to refine what you see in the max perspective viewport.

Prior to installing the plugins and scripts, I spent quite a bit of time in Max learning texturing with UVW Unwrap, and then exporting .3ds files to SimEd, then xPacker.... and eventually via BTB into rFactor.

At some point early on, I noticed my textures looked to have less than half the resolution in the Max viewport than it did after export to SimEd, BTB, and ultimately, rFactor.

It wasn't a scale issue... there were the same number of bricks on the side of the pit garages.. it was just looking like a stretched out 256 x 256 image resolution, rather than the 1024 x 1024 (actual uv map / diffuse texture size) that you can see in SimEd, BTB, and rFactor. BTW... all tex stages are DDS images.

So... with some reading, I found that Max's 'Views>Show Materials in Viewport As' menu let me choose between 2 different settings that would display my uvw unwrap texture maps:

--Standard Display with Maps (which makes my uv map textures look like the 1/4 resolution image described above)

or

--Hardware Display with Maps (which would display the actual 1024 x 1024 diffuse texture resolution)

Needless to say, I always ran Max in "Hardware Display with Maps" mode.

Now that I am using the gMotor materials plugin, swithching to Hardware Display with Maps no longer gives me accurate resolution. [nVidia hardware won't help with gMats(?)]

Somehow, I cant believe that everybody on all these forums puts up with 1/4 resolution on their textures while constructing ..... I must be doing something wrong.

The only settings I've found in Max are in the ones under Customize>Prefrerence Settings>Viewports(Tab)>Configure Driver..(Button).

On the resulting "Configure Direct3d" dialog box, under Appearance Preferences, there are a couple of settings areas for "Background Texture Size", and "Download Texture Size".

Setting their "Match Bitmap Size as Closely as Possible" checkboxes didn't seem to have any effect ... even after restarting the program. According to Max help, this is supposed to override any image reduction as long as the image size is less than 4000 x 4000.

My Max version is 2010. It's viewport dosen't seem to be displaying any of the specular highlights, or bump mapping that show up in the Gmotor Viewer..... and that's OK... I understand that it's not going to look like the shaders used in Viewer and rFactor.

I'm not looking for anything but reasonable diffuse texture pixel resolution. Any ideas on what I'm missing, doing wrong, or how to improve the diffuse map resolution would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance... (some profanity and hair pulling occuring...)

 

[woochoo]

Hi sevware,
yep, that's how it is for me in 3dsmax. presumably it lets the program run a little smoother? if i need to check alignments i do a quick render. it is a bit of a pain. for the price it would be nice to get accurate viewport displays.

 

[mianiak]

Yeah the gmotor materials show a lower res than standard materials and they don't show any shaders. That's just the way it is unfortunately. Personally, I don't have a problem with it, I spose I'm just used to how it works. I'd say that in time you will adapt to it and it wont be a problem for you.

But what you can do is set up a duplicate multi sub material and you can assign it to the selected objects. Switch and swap between the 2. Just use the eyedropper/get material thingy, select a new material ball and grab the mat from the object then change the gmat to a standard mat.

What would really be good is a script that will convert a standard mat to a gmat, I have looked into it but I really have nfi on maxscript. There is this script and maybe it can be used to do this but I haven't looked into it much. http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/material-converter-v0-98b