Control A&D Materials Globally!

Ok,
I often get tired of having to render AO (ambient occlusion) passes along with rendering my animations.  I've often wanted to just use the AO setting in the A&D materials, but I'm way too lazy to go through all of my materials in my scene to turn them on, so I wrote this simple maxscript that does several things for the A&D material:

-turns on AO in all A&D materials of a scene
-sets the AO spread distance to 3'
-turns off backface culling for all materials in scene

Here it is:
for a in objects do
(
if (classof a.material == Arch___Design__mi) then
(
a.material.opts_ao_on = true
a.material.opts_ao_distance = 36
a.material.opts_backface_cull = false
)

if (classof a.material == Multimaterial) then
(
for b = 1 to a.material.numsubs do
(

if (classof a.material.materialList[b] == Arch___Design__mi) then
(
a.material.materialList[b].opts_ao_on = true
a.material.materialList[b].opts_ao_distance = 36
a.material.materialList[b].opts_backface_cull = false
)
)
)
)

I can't take the credit for this script.  A big thanks to max expert Louis Marcoux.  This script can also apply to any other parameter in the A&D material.  If you want to change other parameters of the A&D material, you can find them here. And substitute /add them into the script.

Comments

  1. I make global changes to objects in my scenes using maxscript quite a lot and have been meaning to make a script to do exactly this for ages.

    Thanks for saving me the effort Ramy! :)

    Chris.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Ramy...Very nice post man :)

    In my product Swift-Switch, i scripted this kind of function to checkbox. I used the following command:

    for i in 1 to 24 do
    if ao2.tristate == 1 do
    (
    try meditmaterials[i].opts_ao_exact=on catch ()
    )
    for i in 1 to 24 do
    if ao2.tristate == 0 do
    (
    try meditmaterials[i].opts_ao_exact=off catch ()
    )

    where ao2 refers to the name of my checkbox. I hope this is useful :)

    Visit my blog: http://swiftswitch.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete

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