Can I work in a Metallic PBR workflow within 3DsMax?

[dadeFC4BK]

Yes you can. Arnold is fully capable of supporting a true Metallic PBR workflow. In fact, you can work in both Metallic/Roughness and Specular/Roughness workflows at the same time. So if you have older models that use traditional materials and newer models that use PBR materials, you can work with them both in the same scene.

Using PBR maps in Arnold is quite simple but requires that you understand a few basic settings. I’m going to assume you already understand the fundamentals of using PBR materials and how each map is used to contribute to the final material. Here’s how it’s done in Arnold:

1. Set the Base Scale value to 1. Having this set lower than 1 will cause your basecolor map to appear darker.
2. Plug your basecolor map into the Base Color slot.
3. Make sure your Specular value is also set to 1.
4. Plug your roughness map into the Roughness slot...
5. And your metalness map into the Metalness slot.
6. If you have a material that uses both Metal and Dielectric materials, you will need to set an IOR value for the dielectric type. For simplicity, a setting of 1.52 works fine for most dielectric materials, and especially for materials coming from Substance Painter and other similar programs.
7. You can also add an emissive map if you have one…
8. As well as an opacity map.
9. Finally, if you have a normal map, add a Normal Map node and plug your normal map into the Normal slot.As this is a frequently asked question we have provided both the question and answer in this thread.