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Lighting, Texturing, Rendering in 3DSMAX: Part 2 Added on: Sat Dec 14 2002 |
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Welcome to the second and final part of this tutorial covering texturing and lighting in 3d studio MAX R4. This final part will concentrate on texturing methods, utilizing MAX's procedural textures.
To follow this tutorial it's important to understand what procedural maps are. Procedural maps are texture maps that are mathematicly calculated in MAX, in 3d space. Basicly, what this means is that you get a texture that don't need mapping coordinates in order to be correctly applied to the model, ie. no stretching. Another advantage for many 3d maps, is that you have spinner control over the size and complexity of them.
Procedural mapping is perfect for texturing landscapes and large scenes. No worries about tiling bitmaps...However, procedural maps are not for all scenes, naturally... it's abit more cpu demanding than 2d maps, and... well, you have no real control over them....
Building Complex Materials
Open the scene  lighting_cmpl.zip
We will start this excersize by creating a Raytrace material in the Material Editor. We will use the Raytrace material because it has a much better diffuse shading model and better specular highlights than the Standard material. More about speculars later...
Building complex materials involves putting as much information as possible into the Material Editor. Most materials in MAX have mappable properties that discribe how the material should appear. The material we'll create now will be semi-complex. We will map the Diffuse, Specular and Bump channel, starting with the Bump.
Building Complex Maps
Hide everything except the ground and apply the Raytrace material to it. Also make sure to turn all Render Effects and Volume Lights off, saves time in test renders...
Now, we want a map that doesn't look tiled and simple...total chaos. How do we do that, you say... By blending and masking many layers of procedural maps. Start by creating a simple Noise procedural in the Bump channel of the material, as the base for the map tree. For a more detailed noise, check the Fractal radiobox. Set the Size of the noise abit smaller so we get more details. Bring the High and Low values of the Noise Treshold closer to each other... this will create more contrast in the noise. We don't want smaller details in the noise at this point, because we will create sub-noise maps...
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