Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

3DStudio.nl ships Universal Material Converter for Max

3DStudio.nl – aka developers Joep van der Steen and Stefan Twigt – has released Universal Material Converter, its script for automatically converting all of the materials in a 3ds Max scene to the render engine of your choice.

The new script is a renamed and “basically rewritten” version of its old product, Autodesk Material Converter.

Convert native 3ds Max materials to their mental ray, Iray, V-Ray or Corona equivalents
Running UMC automatically converts all of the materials in a scene into their native equivalents for mental ray, V-Ray, Iray or Corona Renderer; or back to standard 3ds Max materials for use in game engines.

During conversion, duplicate materials are converted to instances, further improving performance: the developers claim that the script delivers a typical increase in render speed of 35%.

Texture maps are converted to their nearest equivalents – for example, VRayDirt becomes CoronaAO – with the script baking out procedural maps to bitmaps when converting materials for use in Max’s Scanline renderer.

According to 3DStudio.nl, the accuracy of the conversion process is “more than 95%”.

Pricing and availability
Universal Material Converter is available for 3ds Max 2012 and above. A new licence costs €95.59 (around $104), including tax.

Read a full list of features in Universal Material Converter on 3DStudio.nl’s website