as you probably know, I am working on BES plugin for Blender. I am dealing with materials settings at the moment. There are two types of materials used by official 3DS max plugin: PteroMat and Standard.
PteroMat
This material support collisions and other (currently) unimportant stuff for my plugin. The important stuff is type of transparency and used textures/maps. There is good post about transparency by apfelbaum, so I will not talk about it now (in Blender I do not distinguish between transparency types at the moment - I will fix it later, I just care if it is transparent or not).
What is important for me is what is the difference between PteroMat maps and how PteroEngine II handles them. I want to make plugin to show these maps same way as PteroEngine II does, so you can see the final result during modeling. For this I need to know how these textures are being rendered by the engine, i.e. what kind of blending is used (Blender has similar blending modes like GIMP, see this page). Here is some info what I found out so far and I will be glad for any corrections or additional informations (I marked text where I am unsure/need help by red color):
1) Diffuse #1 - Ground
-first layer, can has alpha channel
-blending mode: Mix (just render it on object, as is)
2) Diffuse #2 - Multitexture
-usually black and white, no alpha channel
-blending mode: Overlay or Multiply (not sure which one., it is very similar..maybe this black and white is just alpha channel?)
3) Diffuse #3 - Overlay
-same as Ground - just render it over layers below (has alpha channel)
-blending mode: Mix
4) Environment #1
-I did not find any BES object of version 0100 which uses this map
5) LightMap
-typical lightmap, used to render pre-calculated shadows (it will darkens parts of objects where is shadow)
-blending mode: Multiply
6) Environment #2
-same as Environment #1...what is the difference?
7) LightMap (Engine Lights)
-used as transition between textures
-blending mode: Mix (what is the difference between this and Diffuse #3 - Overlay?)
Standard
Standard doesnt have transparency option...does it mean that transparency is enabled or disabled for Standard materials? It looks like most of the Standard textures are the same as textures in PteroMat:
1) Diffuse Color
-same as Diffuse #1 - Ground
2) Displacement
-same as Diffuse #2 - Multitexture
3) Filter Color
-same as Diffuse #3 - Overlay
4) Reflection
-usually placed on windows or handmap, rendering is affected by angle between camera and actual object, probably...
-probably same as Environment #1
I did not find any object using any of these maps: Bump, Ambient Color, Specular Color, Specular Level, Glossiness, Self-Illumination, Refraction... how are they rendered by PteroEngine II?
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