Whats going on with rendering of materials?

[mav3r1ck198-1]

So, for a while now, something has felt a little off about how scenes are rendering both in the editor, and in standalone and I've not been able to put my finger on what that was (still not entirely sure if I'm honest) but in laymen's terms, objects appear brash, there's no subtlety or nuance to the materials any more.

I appreciate that there have been many many changes to Max since its inception, but i also feel that after 4 years of development, you would expect that graphically, it would at least be on a par with how things started. I don't believe this is the correct at present.

These 3 images, whilst ill grant you were taken from very early GGMax development videos, all imho shows significantly better rendering of assets than we currently enjoy. the last picture is taken from a video showing how wicked renders pbr materials in Max Again, i appreciate that a lot has changed since that time, but it looks significantly better )as does the water but that's a whole other post)

tonight ive been messing around in blender, creating some modular dungeon tiles for use in GGMax (image above) cheap and cheerful but still looks great in 3DCoats rendering suite right? I exported a full set of PBR materials, inc. displacement, AO etc etc.

This is how it looks in the editor once imported

But its a dungeon right? Its not gonna be sunshine and rainbows down there, so you want it nice and dark, maybe a fire lit torch to add depth and character.......

I dont really know what else to say other than my final image looks terrible. Something isn't right here, whether its the AO, or the surface maps are making everything ugly, this isnt how i expect my scene to look. I have used a probe in that scene, which appears to do nothing, no metallness appears to be reacting to light, shadows have no depth, they are incredibly hard, all in all its really disappointing.

Im on DEVTEST, but it looks the same in EXP, as ever, my sepc is as follows:

Device name DESIGN-MAIN
Processor 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K 5.50 GHz
Installed RAM 128 GB (128 GB usable)
Device ID DC911553-588F-4B67-951B-974A8D5D9BF0
Product ID 00330-80000-00000-AA222
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Windows Pro

Nvidia RTX4090, all drivers are uptodate

[OldFlak]

To me it looks to me like the engine is only using the sunlight and sky to show the normal detail

• whereas any light should bring out the normal detail correctly

[Kasseyus]

@mav3r1ck198-1 Would you be able to send me the dungeon tile so I can have a look in and around it - see if I can see what may be happening. Can be sent to [email protected].

[mav3r1ck198-1]

@Kasseyus

https://drive.google.com/file/d/172tVYS-e5aq6Wqkl5iLvzgk8GB9wmEEJ/view?usp=sharing

its not important

[mav3r1ck198-1]

update:

It appears imho that there's an issue with how surface maps are being rendered.

fresh out of the modelling software

In the GGMax importer (how id expect it to look in the editor

how it looks in the CC

How it looks in the editor.

There appears to be something happening with how the metalness is reacting to the lighting in the editor, both global AND added lights. I would hope we can all agree that the model looks better in the editor than it does when added to a scene. I don't think its just me

[Kasseyus]

Thanks. I've downloaded the zip file now and will look into this.