Noise - Wood - Tile - Distortion - Gradient - Tile & Displacement
Where you get it? Go to download page
Basically this map completely replaces Gradient Ramp, Particle Age and Falloff maps by combining their features into a single map. It also offers a lot more features which are not possible with any of Max's native maps such as color by particle size. Its superior to Gradient Ramp in every way, including speed and maxscript access.
BerconGradient Help
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Where you get it? Go to download page
All you can ever wish from Gradient
Basically this map completely replaces Gradient Ramp, Particle Age and Falloff maps by combining their features into a single map. It also offers a lot more features which are not possible with any of Max's native maps such as color by particle size. Its superior to Gradient Ramp in every way, including speed and maxscript access.
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Gradient You can edit the gradient by clicking on keys and changing their parameters from interface above. You animate the keys just like you would any other Max parameter by enabling Auto animation mode and then moving the keys. You can add keys by holding down Alt and left clicking the gradient and remove keys by again holding Alt and left click on key. There is also right-click menu which you can use to edit the gradient. |
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UVW mode This is the normal gradient type, giving all the basic gradient types as shown below. Note that you usually want to change Mapping type to Explicit Mapping when using this gradient type. |
| Linear | Radial | Rectangle | Diagonal |
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| Pong | Spiral | Sweep | Tartan |
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Range These parameters define the range gradient is drawn. For UVW, Normal, Particle age, Random and Map gradient types these values are usually kept at 0.0 and 1.0 because return values of these map types are always in this range. However type such as Distance returns the actual distance in World Space values. So you usually need to use large values such as 0.0 and 1000.0, this depends on the scale of your scene. You can also choose which way the gradient behaves when values are outside the given range as shown below. |
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Range with UVW and Mapped You can use the range parameters to repeat gradient with UVW type as shown below. The gradient is repeated multiple times with low range max value (0.0/0.1 means its repeated 10 times, 0.0/0.2 = 5 times etc). Below is also an example of mapped mode with BerconNoise in it. Often the maps don't return values using the full 0.0 - 1.0 range so you might want to adjust the range values to make sure the whole gradient is used, not just small part on the center. |
| Linear with Range 0.0 - 0.1 (Tile) | Radial with Range 0.0 - 0.1 (Mirror) | Spiral with Range 0.0 - 0.2 (Tile) | Mapped with BerconNoise |
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Normal & Distance This gradient type offers you the same functionality as Max's Falloff map. It also has the Object Z mode which measures the normals compared to Z-axis of the object you give it in Normal mode and in Distance mode it measures distance on the objects Z-axis starting from objects pivot point. |
| Normal fall off types include Perpendicular/Parallel, Towards/Away and Fresnel. Below are each pictured with fall off on X-axis (top row) and on View (bottom row) |
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| On the left is red-green gradient which is using Distance (on Z-axis) gradient type and on the right is gradient using Lighting type (100% self-illuminated red-green gradient). |
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Random Often you have multiple objects or particles you want to have slight color variation. Random mode offers an easy way out for this problem. It randomly picks color from the gradient for each Particle, Material ID or Object. The images below are both using a single material which has BerconGradient in diffuse slot. This is very flexible way for altering colors between number of objects using same material. |
| Random color from linear gradient | Color from gradient with 3 solid colors |
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Particles Besides just giving particles random colors you can have more specific color variation between them. You can use particle speed, age or size to determine their color. |
| Color by particle age | Color by particle size | Color by particle speed |
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Maxscript Here you have 2 example maxscript. 1st one creates Hue gradient and the second one takes top row of bitmap image's pixels as gradient keys. The vast number of keys has very little effect on overall render time however such gradients are tedious to edit manually. The Hue gradient script is good way to see how adding and editing gradient keys works. Basically you have 3 arrays one for color, one for position and one for maps. To add a key you add value to each of these arrays. If you don't want to use map add undefined instead, you need to keep sizes of these arrays equal, the lowest size defines the actual number of keys. So if you have 6 colors and 6 positions but only 2 values in map array you'll have 2 keys in the gradient. Download Hue gradient maxscript Download Picture to Gradient maxscript |