One of the most rewarding aspects of 3D Studio MAX is the ability to make your own materials. Modeling is clearly a necessary skill, but when it comes time to render your scenes, the materials and textures you've applied can be the deciding element between good work and impressive work. MAX comes with a wide variety of textures included, but they aren't perfect, and knowing how to fix them and add your own materials and material libraries is vital to successful projects.
Materials in MAX are made up of several different maps, each of which can be edited and tweaked to perfect your materials. In part one of this tutorial I will try and explain these maps and how they affect the materials. I know that this may seem basic, but without the basics what do you have to build on?
This is the materials editor. You are probably already somewhat familiar with it. It is from here that you will control most of the attributes of your materials.
The diffuse map is the map that determines the basic appearance of your material; it's where you set the primary color or bitmap you will use. Adjusting the color is easy enough to do. Click in the colored rectangle next to the Diffuse option and a color picker will open. If you want black rubber tires for a car you can select the right black with the color picker, or select a yellow for house paint, red for a candle stick, etc.
The diffuse map is also the map you will use to apply bitmap images to a material such as a tile wall. Next to the color selection box for the diffuse map is a raised square. Clicking on it will allow you to pick the type of sub-map you want. In the case of a tile texture the sub-map will be a bitmap.
Opening the Material/Map Browser gives you many options. Bitmaps, checkerboards, masks, and a wide variety of other map types may be selected to modify the diffuse map. In MAX "bitmap" refers to any of the digital image formats, from .jpeg to .bmp to .tga. Most often any diffuse map that is not a solid color will be a "bitmap" image.
The Material/Map Browser lets you select the type of sub-map to apply to your materials
The selected bitmap image will appear in the image window so you know what you'll be getting.
Okay, this looks like a good place to wrap up Part 1 of this materials tutorial. In Part 2 I'll address the next most important map for most materials, the bump map. If things seem a little slow and basic right now don't worry; this is all leading up to how to build your own libraries of custom materials. For those of you who have already learned to tweak the materials that came with MAX I hope you can be patient. For those people just learning I hope that this (my first attempt at a tutorial) is helpful.
Until next time then-
Dxyner
This tutorial, all text and images contained herein, and all banners and logos are (c) Flaming Ball -o- Death Designs 2001
