2008

The raytrace material on page 5394 uses a subset of the standard material
shaders: Anisotropic, Blinn, Metal, Oren-Nayar-Blinn, and Phong. You choose
the raytrace material's shader on the material's Raytrace Basic Parameters
rollout
on page 5397 .
The other types of materials in 3ds Max don't give you a choice of shader.
Materials (and lights and cameras) used with the mental ray renderer on page
6039 can use mental ray shaders, which are not the same as the standard material
shaders. See Shaders (mental ray Renderer) on page 7925 .
Shadow Maps (Light Objects)
Example of shadow-mapped shadows
A shadow map is a bitmap that the renderer generates during a pre-rendering
pass of the scene. Shadow maps don't show the color cast by transparent or
translucent objects. On the other hand, shadow maps can have soft-edged
shadows, which ray-traced shadows cannot.
A shadow-map is projected from the direction of the spotlight. This method
provides a softer edge and can require less calculation time than ray-traced
shadows, but it's less accurate.
You can adjust the shadow map settings to achieve a sharper shadow. This
involves changing the resolution and the pixel sampling of the shadow's
bitmap. Because shadow-map shadows are only bitmaps, you need to keep in
mind their resolution in relation to your distance from the shadow, and the
detail required by the shadow. If the resolution is too low, and the camera
too close, the shadow might look more like sooty smudges.
Glossary | 7927