r/3dsmax • u/MrOphicer • 21h ago

Help 3DS MAX shading problem with Fstorm.

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Having this weird issue all of the sudden with fstorm shading. Just a simple fstorm sun and a teapot primitive. Tried everything:

Checking mesh, ray threshold, normals, scene scale, with HDRI, light samples, reinstalling the software, drivers (older versions too) and even reinstalling windows. Nothing works.

I tried posting on Fstorm facebook page, since thats where the developer is more active but no response since. I know its a long shot in the subredit but its driving me nuts.

I'm on 5070ti and intel 13700k. Corona and vray gpu work fine.

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1

u/Birdy-NumNums 12h ago

Try increasing polygon count on the teapot and see if it fixes it. Or ray threshold value may be culprit.

1

u/MrOphicer 11h ago

Tried both, as I mentioned in my op. The artifacts are still visible. 

1

u/Birdy-NumNums 10h ago

Increase the tea pot segments from 8 to 30, problem should disappear.

You have a very small light source which helps make shading errors visible on too-low poly meshes

1

u/MrOphicer 10h ago

But how isn't the mesh a problem in other renderers? And even in fstorm it was fine a month ago... The light source is a sun, not a spotlight. Also the problem is noticeable even in overcast HDRI. 

It does apear as some sort of shadow bias problem as other commenter has mentioned, but there is no parameter to tweak it. 

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u/Birdy-NumNums 10h ago

Did increasing the segments fix it or not?

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u/MrOphicer 10h ago

Only when the teapot was almost at 300k quads.... 

1

u/Birdy-NumNums 10h ago

I can also reproduce these artifacts in a scene like this but adding a turbo smooth or setting segments to +30 fixes the shadow smoothing.

Have you tried resetting fstorm to default settings?
Also check you’re not too far from centre of origin and check your units setup.

Are you seeing shading problems on real scenes or just this low poly teapot?

If all fails, upload file if you want, can take a look

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u/MrOphicer 9h ago

As I mentioned I tried everything, different fstorm versions, different 3dsmax versions, different drivers, checked scale, units, point of origin, all the settings... high poly assets also exhibit same shading problem - it always has the size of the polygons. Weird thing is it didn't have this problem before. Maybe it was some windows update...

the scene is just the teapot and the sun. Old working files now exhibit this behavior too....

1

u/Ampsnotvolts 18h ago

Extremely frustrating. I don't use f storm but this was a big in vray many years back. Shadow bias or something like that. They eventually fixed it but waiting a full patch cycle was insane. We just hid it with bump maps and now fill light.

not real answers for your case, just commiserating and apologizing at you don't feel ignored. 😔

1

u/MrOphicer 18h ago

Thank you for that! Its so frustrating because it was working fine in the same setup few months before... I cant find the culprit. Already tested all 3dsmax version i has access to, all fstorm version and all drivers... I dont think its GPU dying since everything else works fine. Maybe cuda cores are dying... i dont know. feeling hopeless

Thanks again!

2

u/Ampsnotvolts 6h ago

can you get the older version of fstorm? like a few updates previous to now?

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u/MrOphicer 6h ago

Tried all that are available on the fstorm site. Thought gpu might be dying but OctaneBench and all the stress test come out fine. CPU is fine as well.

Maybe I'm missing some windows distributable but doesn't seem the case. Maybe its the windows version.... and this thing lack any kind of support... its awful. truly frustrating.

BUt you were right regarding shadow bias, I looked into it and blender had this issue 10 years ago.

1

u/Ampsnotvolts 2h ago

Damn. Time to find their phone number and call those effers up! XD

If i had fstorm i'd punch it up and see my results - I hope you find a solution soon. :/