New shaders for 2013/2014 Max

[madoke]

I just installed the new Max 2013 shaders that are included with the 2014 RW into 3dsMax 2013. The shader files, in the dev folder, provide 5 files, one of which is for the 64 bit version of 2013 Max. The other files are for 32 and 64 bit Max2011, 64 bit Max 2014, and 32 bit Max 2013. The files have a .dlu extension. I have installed the Max 2013 64 bit plugin into the 64 bit Max "plugins" folder. With only this one plugin installed, it appears all the shaders are loaded, but there have been some changes. Instead of "Kuju material" we now have RW Material. There are a ton of apparently new shaders. I don't see any documents yet that explain any new ones, but I admit that my search has not been exhaustive. One would assume that by including the shader plugins in the sim, they would also include documentation, but why start something new, right? I have imported a fully textured .obj file and found that the .png textures are not showing up visually in Max. In fact, the imported object is invisible, even though all the textures were brought in as multi materials with all the maps and all the right file links. Switching to RW Material, and applying TexDiff, for example, gives me a white texture, but no image. The same object, when imported into Max 2010, works perfectly. Exporting an item now uses the RW Intermediate Geometry rather than the old Kuju Intermediate geometry. Same for animations. So, looks like the primary issue is related to the visibility of mapped textures. I haven't tested jpgs, but in 2010 either .png or .jpg work the same, and I can't imagine why Autodesk would change this in this later version.

I'd like to hear some feedback from other users as to your experiences, and/or suggestions. I own both Max 2010 and Max 2013, both 32 and 64 bit, and there can be some benefits to using the later version if it will work properly on RW destined objects.

Doug