Cycles Materials

These materials are included with this plugin for completeness, but should be avoided when possible. For most use cases you should use either the Max Physical Material for simplicity or a Cycles Shader Graph for control. These materials land somwhere in between those two options and can be awkward to use.

Basic Cycles Materials

This plugin provides a Max material for each native Cycles shader type. These materials are:

  • Cycles Add
  • Cycles Anisotropic
  • Cycles Diffuse
  • Cycles Emission
  • Cycles Glass
  • Cycles Glossy
  • Cycles Hair
  • Cycles Holdout
  • Cycles Mix
  • Cycles Principled BSDF
  • Cycles Refraction
  • Cycles Subsurface Scattering
  • Cycles Toon
  • Cycles Translucent
  • Cycles Transparent
  • Cycles Velvet
  • Cycles Volume Absorption
  • Cycles Volume Add
  • Cycles Volume Mix
  • Cycles Volume Scatter

Information about how to configure these shaders can be found in the Blender manual.

Add and Mix Materials

Add and Mix materials are split into two categories: surface and volume. One surface and one volume shaders cannot both be an input to the same Add/Mix node.

Combining a surface and volume into a single shader can be done with the Cycles Shader Material described below.

Normal Maps

Several of the basic Cycles materials support normal maps. Any Cycles material that supports normal mapping will have this parameter rollout.

Normal map parameters

Enable Normal Map - The normal map will only be rendered when this is enabled.

Space - Specifies the coordinate space to use for the normal map.

Strength - Sets the strength of the normal map effect. Higher values will cause the normal map to be more visible.

Color - The RGB color used to represent the normal vector. Your normal map should be plugged in to this slot.

Invert Green Channel - Inverts the green (Y) channel of the normal map. This option may need to be enabled depending on the software used to generate your normal map.

Note: Normal maps made using Max's scanline renderer require this box to be checked.

Cycles Shader Material

Not to be confused with the Cycles Shader Graph Material, the Cycles Shader material allows you to combine a surface shader with a volume shader as well as set shader-level parameters.

Shader material parameters

Viewport Slot

A number of Cycles materials have a slot named Viewport that takes a material as its input. This slot can be used to override how the material is displayed in the 3ds Max viewport. Whatever material is plugged into the viewport slot will be rendered in the viewport.

The viewport slot has no impact on the output of the renderer. It only affects how a material appears in the Max viewport.

This slot can be useful to cover for the fact that most Cycles materials do not have a viewport preview available. You can create a rough approximation of your material with the Physical Material and then assign it to the viewport slot.