Materials are useful for making your objects appear more lifelike. If you model a table and want it to look like polished wood, you can define a shiny material in 3ds Max and apply a wooden texture, such as an image file of wood, to the diffuse channel of that material.

Materials also come in handy when you want to add the appearance of detail to an object without actually modeling it. For instance, if you want a brick wall to look like real brick, but you don't want to model the bricks in the wall, you could use a brick texture. Using a texture would be a time-saving alternative. You can plainly see a brick wall in Figure 7.1.

However, in Figure 7.2, the wall shows the appearance of detail in each line of bricks using a texture map (called bump mapping). This texture map renders the appearance of dimension for each brick and the inset grooves between each of them, without the hassle of actually modeling the surface of the wall with that level of precision.

This shortcut is an easy trap to fall into. Using texture maps to accommodate too much detail can make your scene look fake and primitive. Don't depend on textures to do the work for you. A model that is not detailed enough for a close-up shot more than likely will not be saved by a detailed texture map. In the end, the level of detail that is needed boils down to trial and error. You have to see how much texture trickery you can use to keep a model's detailing at bay before the model no longer works in the shot. In the beginning, it's safe to assume you should model and texture as much detail as you can. You can work toward efficiency as you learn more about 3ds Max and CG.

Figure 7.1. A brick wall

Like a model, a texture map needs to be as detailed as the scene calls for. You will want to gauge the detail of your texturing based on the use of the object in the scene. A far-away object won't need to have a massive texture map applied to its material. Textures mapped onto a material often add the final element of realism to a scene, and it takes a lot of experience to determine how detailed to make any textures for mapping. So let's start gaining some of that experience now.

Material Basics

What makes a material look the way it does? The primary force in a material is its color. However, there are several ways to describe the color of a material. In 3ds Max, three main parameters control the color of a material: ambient color, diffuse color, and specular color.

Figure 7.2. The same brick wall shown from an angle. The detail in the wall was created with bump mapping.

Ambient color is the color of a material when it is exposed to ambient light. This essentially means that an object will appear this color in indirect light or in shadow. Ambient gives you the very base color of the object, upon which you add the diffuse and specular colors.

Diffuse color is the color of a material when the object is exposed to direct light. Typically, ambient and diffuse colors are not too far apart. As a default they are locked together.

Specular color is the color of a shiny object's highlight. The specular highlight on an object can be controlled by factors other than its color—for example, its size and shape. The color, however, sets the tone of the object and, in some cases, the degree and look of its shine.

For example, in a new scene, open the Material Editor by choosing Rendering → Material Editor. The spheres you see in the Material Editor are sample slots where you can edit materials.

Each tile, or slot, represents one material that may be assigned to one or more objects in the scene. As you click on each slot, the material's parameters are displayed below. You edit the material through the settings you see in the Material Editor.

Select one of the material slots, and click it. Let's change the color of the material. Under the Blinn Basic Parameters, click on the gray color swatch next to the Diffuse parameter. This opens the Color Selector window, as shown here.

Using the sliders on the right, you can set the red, green, and blue values for the color, or you can control the color using the Hue, Sat (Saturation), and Value levels. For more on color and RGB/HSV values, see Chapter 1, "Basic Concepts."

You can also very easily select the desired color from the gradient on the left by dragging your mouse pointer over the colors until you find one you prefer. It's best to pick the general color you need from the swatch on the left and then tweak the exact color by using either the RGB or the HSV controls on the right. The Hue of a color represents the actual color itself. Saturation defines how saturated that color is. Value sets how bright the color will be.

Once you have a color you like, close the Color Selector. If you want to restart the color, press Reset to zero out any changes. You'll notice that the ambient color has changed as well as the diffuse color. You will see why in the next section on the Material Editor itself.

In addition, you can add textures to almost any of the parameters for a material. Notice the blank square icon next to the Diffuse color swatch. Click that icon, and you will get the Material/Map browser, as shown in Figure 7.3. The Material/Map browser is used throughout the chapter.

Figure 7.3. The Material/Map browser

The Material Editor is the central place in 3ds Max where you do all of your material creation and editing. You create materials to assign to any single or group of objects in the scene. You can also have different materials assigned to different parts of the same object. In a full scene, it's customary to have many different materials

It is wise to get to know how the Material Editor works first, and then get to know the types of materials and shaders in 3ds Max. Open the Material Editor by choosing Rendering → Material Editor or by pressing the keyboard shortcut M.Figure 7.4 shows the Material Editor and its major parts.

The following list describes the functions of the Material Editor:

Sample Slot The sample slot provides you with a quick preview of your material. Each material is displayed on a sphere in one of the tiles (or slots) you see in the Material Editor dialog. Right-clicking on any of the materials will give you a few more options, including the ability to change how many sample tiles you can see in the Material Editor (as shown here). The fewer samples, the quicker the Material Editor will load.

Get Material This button brings up the Material/Map browser. Here you can browse from the scene or from a Material Library. The Material Library stores a collection of saved materials that you can bring into the current scene. You can use 3ds Max's default materials or create your own and store them in your own custom library.

Figure 7.4. The Material Editor

Assign Material to Selection You can use this button to assign the material to the selected object(s) in the scene. You can also apply materials by clicking and dragging the sample sphere from the Material Editor directly onto the object in the viewport; however, this can be less accurate, especially if you have a lot of objects.

Reset Map/Mtl to Default Settings This function resets the values for the map or material in the active sample slot.

Put to Library You can save your material to a library using this function. Building up a library of useful materials can save time, especially when you're trying to re-create complex materials. Once you've gotten a material just right, there's no reason you shouldn't save it to your library by using this button

Material Effects Channel Here you can assign an effect ID to the material. Effects are used in the video post or Combustion for things such as glow, highlights, and so on. Some of these effects will be covered in Chapter 11, "3ds Max Rendering."

Show Map in Viewport This will display your texture map in the viewport. This means that you won't have to render every time you want to see how your material appears on a 3D object. However, displaying your map in a viewport has limitations. The limitations are basically those of your graphics card and your chosen method of displaying 3D in the viewport (Open GL, Direct 3D, or Software). The difference between viewing the map in the viewport and in its final rendered state may be quite different. However, seeing a map in the viewport is useful on many levels.

Go to Parent Just as you created objects that related to each other, materials in 3ds Max may have several components to them (such as texture maps) that work in a hierarchy, where information from one node is fed upstream into the parameter for the material. When you are working with sub-maps, this option will take you back to the base material. This makes it easier to navigate in the Material Editor when you are editing your materials.

Go Forward to Sibling This function is the reverse of Go to Parent. This option will take you into the next map channel.

Preview Type Sometimes the default sphere won't give you an adequate preview of the material. You can change the preview to a cube or a cylinder.

Pick Material from Object When you need to edit a material on an object, you can use this button to select the material from an object in the scene. The material is placed in the active sample slot.

Material Name This is the name you give a material. This should be a descriptive name for the material that will instantly tell you what the material is for. 3ds Max will automatically give new materials a default name, such as the name 03, but it's recommended that you change the material name from the default. You should do this before you apply it to an object when you are adjusting the parameters (color, etc.) to suit your needs.

Material Type Different materials have different uses. When called on to create a more complex material, for example, you can change the material type to Blend. A Blend material will mix the results from two different materials together for a compound effect. The default material type is Standard. Material types are explained in the next section.

Shader Type Shading types describe how the surface responds to light. How an object looks depends on how its surface reacts to light, so the Shader type for a material is very important. Shaders provide different options for specific materials. The default shader is Blinn. Shader types are covered later in this chapter. Not all material types let you specify different shaders.

Miscellaneous Settings These are fairly basic settings used to change the appearance of the material. Here are two important settings.

Wire When you turn Wire on, the object attached to this material will render as a Wireframe object, as shown in Figure 7.5. This simple setting is very powerful; it's used when you need to render line art or wireframe views.

2-Sided This setting enables you to render both sides of a single surface. By default, only one side of a surface will render, and that is typically all you need. Sometimes, however, when you penetrate through a surface, you will have to see the other side. In this image (Figure 7.6), a hemisphere is rendered without 2-Sided turned on.

In this image (Figure 7.7), 2-Sided has been enabled. Notice the inside of the hemisphere.

Locks Here you can lock the Ambient parameter to the Diffuse parameter and lock the Diffuse to the Specular. Any changes made to one while the locks are enabled affect both.

Ambient, Diffuse, and Specular Color Changing the ambient color will affect the way the material appears for ambient light. Changing the diffuse color affects the overall color of the material. Changing the specular color changes the color of the highlighted light. You change the color by clicking on the color swatch next to the parameter.

Diffuse and Specular Maps These buttons provide shortcuts to the maps for Diffuse and Specular. A map applied in Diffuse (for example: bitmap, which is an image file) will affect the base appearance of the material. A map applied to Specular will use the mapped image to define the color of the shine. Mapping is covered in the Pool Ball exercise later in this chapter, as well as in the rocket that we'll texture.

Specular Level This setting determines how shiny the material appears. For something such as a metallic surface, the setting will be up around 180 to 220. You can also map a grayscale texture to determine which areas will appear shiny and which will appear dull.

Glossiness This setting determines the spread of the specular shine. A higher value means that it will look more plastic (high gloss across the surface of the model).

Figure 7.5. The render as a Wireframe object (Wire on)

Figure 7.6. The render without 2-Sided turned on

Figure 7.7. The render with 2-Sided enabled

Self Illumination This slot defines how the material is affected by light. The more self illumination it is given, the less the material is affected by lighting, but the flatter it will become.

Opacity A material's opacity determines how transparent it appears. If it is set to 100 (the default), then the material is 100 percent opaque—that is, it's solid. If it is set to 0, then it is completely invisible. You can apply a grayscale opacity map here that uses a bitmap (or other map) to define which portions of the material are transparent. Areas of white on the map will be opaque, whereas the black areas will render transparent; the intermediate values of gray will have different levels of transparency.

Maps Maps allow you to apply bitmap or procedural textures, which help define the material beyond simple color and opacity settings. Common maps include bump maps (use grayscale values to simulate bumps and dents), displacement maps (use grayscale maps to mathematically calculate depth and height and redefine the mesh accordingly), reflections, glossiness, and so on, as shown in Figure 7.8.

Figure 7.8. Applying maps to these parameters further defines the look of your material.

Material Types

Different materials have different uses. The Standard material is fine for most uses. However, when you require a more complex material, you can change the material type to one that will fit your needs. To change a material type, click the Material Type button called out in Figure 7.4. By default, it displays Standard in the button. Once you click the button, the Material/Map browser opens (as shown in Figure 7.9) from which you can choose the material type.

Standard

Standard material is the default type for the materials in the Material Editor. This material has values for ambient, diffuse, and specular components. With it, you can imitate just about any surface type you can imagine. The more advanced surface types (see the following discussions) combine elements of different shaders for more complex effects.

Blend

Just as it sounds, this material type blends two materials together. Figure 7.10 shows the parameters for a Blend material type. Notice the controls for mixing two different materials. You assign the materials through the Material 1 and Material 2 parameters.

Figure 7.9. Choose the material type from the Material/Map browser

Figure 7.10. The Blend material type allows you to mix two different materials together.

Composite

Similar to the Blend, a Composite material combines up to 10 materials, using additive colors, subtractive colors, or opacity mixing (Figure 7.11).

Double Sided

The Double Sided material type divides the material into two sub-materials, one for the outward face and one for the inner face. Figure 7.12 shows the parameters for the material.

Figure 7.11. The Composite material type allows you to blend up to 10 materials.

Figure 7.12. A Double Sided material allows you to assign two materials to either side of a surface.

To set the Facing Material, you can click on the bar to create and edit a new material, or you can click and drag an existing material from the Material Editor onto the Facing Material bar. You set up the Back material in exactly the same way.

In the following graphic (Figure 7.13), one material is assigned to the outer face of an object and another one is assigned to the back of the surface. Here, a bowl has a solid blue material mapped to the outside, and the inside face is a checkerboard pattern map.

Neither the facing nor the back material need to have 2-Sided enabled for the Double Sided material to render both sides of the surface.

Ink 'n Paint

Ink 'n Paint is a powerful Cartoon material that creates outlines and flat cartoon shading for 3D objects based on Falloff parameters. Figure 7.14 shows the parameters for an Ink 'n Paint material.

Figure 7.15 shows you a sample render with the Cartoon shading material applied to a bowl and a cone.

Matte/Shadow

Use Matte/Shadow material when you want to isolate the shadow. The material will receive shadows, but it will remain transparent for everything else. It is useful for rendering objects onto a photo or video background because it creates a separate shadow that you can composite on top of the background. Rendering in separate passes, such as a separate shadow, is very useful because you can have total control of the image by compositing just the right amount of any particular pass.

Figure 7.13. One material is assigned to the outer face and another material is assigned to the back.

Figure 7.14. The Ink 'n Paint material's parameters

Figure 7.15. A Cartoon-shaded render using the Ink 'n Paint material

Multi/Sub-Object

Use this material when you need to apply different materials to polygons of a 3D object. Material IDs are assigned either manually or automatically, depending on how you create the material. (This is covered later in the chapter.) Material IDs determine which sub-material is applied to which polygon. This lets you assign different surface treatments to a single object. This keeps modeling simpler because you do not have to make separate objects for everything that needs a different material.

Raytrace

The Raytrace material is a powerful material that expands the available parameters to give you more control over photo-real renderings. The material uses more system resources than the Standard material at render time, but it can produce more accurate renders—especially when true reflections and refractions are concerned. You will use this material in Chapter 11.

Shellac

The Shellac material superimposes one material on another using additive composition. This allows you to create a material that is highly glossy, such as a finely varnished wood surface (Figure 7.16).

Top/Bottom

Top/Bottom divides the material into a top material and bottom material with an adjustable position (Figure 7.17). The material is in the first slot in the Material Editor in the figure. This material is useful for creating an object that has two different materials on either side, such as a cookie with chocolate on the top.

Figure 7.16. The Shellac material allows you to superimpose a shiny layer on top of another material.

Figure 7.17. The Top/Bottom material type

Shader Types

The way light reflects from a surface defines that surface to your eye. In 3ds Max, you can control what kind of surface you work with by changing the shader type for a material. This option will let you mimic different types of surfaces such as dull wood or shiny paint or metal. The following descriptions outline the differences in how the shader types react to light.

Anisotropic

Most of the surface types that you will see in this section typically create rounded specular highlights that spread evenly across a surface. By contrast, anisotropic surfaces have properties that differ according to direction. This creates a specular highlight that is uneven across the surface, changing according to the direction you specify on the surface. The Anisotropic shader (Figure 7.18) is good for surfaces that are deformed, such as foil wrappers or hair.

Figure 7.18. The Anisotropic shader

Figure 7.19 shows the Material Editor for an Anisotropic material. Notice the extra controls for the specular highlights. These allow you to control how the specular will fall across the surface.

Blinn

This is the default material in 3ds Max because it is a general-purpose, flexible shader. The Blinn shader (Figure 7.20) creates a smooth surface with some shininess. If you set the specular color to black, however, this shader will not display a specular and will lose its shininess, making it perfect for regular dull surfaces, such as paper or an indoor wall. Figure 7.21 shows the Blinn shader controls in the Material Editor.

Because this is the most-often used shader, let's take a look at its Material Editor controls. The ambient, color, and specular colors all work as you saw earlier in this chapter. You can set the color you want by clicking the color swatch, or you can map a texture map to any of these parameters by clicking the Map button and choosing the desired map from the Material/Map browser.

SPECULAR HIGHLIGHT CONTROLS

The parameters in the Specular Highlights section of the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout are interesting in this shader. The specular color, which defaults to white, controls the color of the highlight. Decreasing the brightness of that specular color, whatever the color may be, will decrease the brightness of the specular highlight on the object, making it seem less shiny. Changing the specular color to black will negate any surface shine.

Figure 7.19. The Material Editor for the Anisotropic material

Figure 7.20. The Blinn shader

Figure 7.21. The Material Editor for the Blinn material

The surface shine is also regulated by the Specular Level parameter. The higher the value, the hotter the specular highlight will render on the object. Figure 7.22 shows a sphere with a Blinn with a Specular Level of 0 on the left, a Specular Level of 35 in the middle, and a Specular Level of 100 on the right.

The Glossiness parameter controls the width of the specular highlight. With the same sphere with a Specular Level of 35, Figure 7.23 shows you a Glossiness of 0 on the left (which creates a broad specular), a Glossiness of 35 in the middle (which creates a fairly tight, shiny specular highlight), and a Glossiness of 75 on the right (which creates a high gloss pinpoint specular highlight). The higher the value, the glossier the surface will appear.

Finally, the Soften parameter controls the softness of the specular highlight. Figure 7.24 shows a sphere with a Blinn material assigned with a Specular Level of 55, a Glossiness of 10, and with a Soften value of 0 on the left and a Soften value of 1 (the max) on the right.

Soften controls the specular breadth on specular highlights that are already broad—that is, they have lower Glossiness values. You may want to look at these parameters at work in a Max scene, as your monitor will display the specular highlights better than a printed page.

Figure 7.22. The Specular Level of a Blinn controls the amount of highlight on the surface.

Figure 7.23. The Glossiness parameter controls the width of the specular highlight.

Figure 7.24. The Soften parameter helps rein in broad specular highlights by softening their edges.

You've probably noticed the graph (shown here) in the Material Editor when you work with the Specular Level, Glossiness, and Soften parameters. This graph shows you the falloff of the specular you are editing for the material. The shorter the graph, the lower the level of specular highlight. The rounder the graph, the broader and softer the specular highlight.

For shiny objects, you will need to use a fairly sharp specular. For extremely shiny objects, such as polished metals, a pinpoint specular is best. Plastic objects will work best with a broad, diminished specular. Matte objects, such as paper or cloth, work great without a specular highlight, or at least a very darkly colored one.

SELF-ILLUMINATION

The Self-Illumination parameter creates the illusion of incandescence on an object, meaning the object seems to be self-lit. The object's darker areas (where it is not receiving direct light) will essentially take on the color specified for the Self-Illumination parameter.

The higher this value, the flatter the object will appear, because Self-Illumination will essentially negate any shadowing or ambient falloff on the material. The specular highlights on the material will still show up on a material with Self-Illumination turned all the way up to 1.0. You can also change the color of the Self-Illumination by clicking the Color check box and choosing a color in the swatch that appears when Color is enabled. This allows you to have a different self-illumination color than the color of the material itself. Figure 7.25 shows a Self-Illumination value of 0 on the left and a Self-Illumination value of 1.0 on the right. Notice how the sphere flattens out as Self-Illumination helps keep the shadow areas as bright as the diffuse.

Figure 7.25. The Self-Illumination value sets the incandescence of amaterial.

OPACITY

The Opacity setting sets the transparency of an object. The higher the Opacity value, the more solid it renders. The lower the Opacity value, the more see-through the object will render.

Metal

The Metal shader is not too different from the Blinn shader. Metal creates a lustrous metallic effect, with much the same controls as a Blinn shader, but without the effect of any specular highlights. When you are first starting, it's best to create most of your material looks with the Blinn shader until you're at a point where Blinn simply cannot do what you need. The graphic (Figure 7.26) displays a sphere with a Metal shader with a Specular Level of 120 and a Glossiness of 60.

The black areas of the shader may throw you off at first, but keep in mind that a metallic surface is ideally black when it has nothing to reflect. Metals are best seen when they reflect the environment. As such, this shader requires a lot of reflection work to make the metal look just right.

Multi-Layer

With some surfaces, you need complex highlights. In some cases, while an Anisotropic might be useful, you may need further control in the complexity of your specular shape and falloff. A Multi-Layer shader will stack two Anisotropic highlights together to give you increased control over the highlights you can create.

Here you can see a Multi-Layer material assigned to a sphere (Figure 7.27). The two layered specular highlights are created in such a way, as shown in Figure 7.28, to create an "X" formation for the highlight.

Figure 7.26. A sphere with a Metal shader

Figure 7.27. A Multi-Layer material assigned to a sphere

Figure 7.28. The Multi-Layer shader lets you create complex highlights.

Oren-Nayar-Blinn

The Oren-Nayar-Blinn shader (Figure 7.29) generally creates good matte surfaces such as cloth or clay. The shader has specular highlight controls very similar to those of the Blinn shader.

Phong

The Phong shader (Figure 7.30) is a legacy shader that was created before the introduction of the Blinn shading model The Phong shader looks very similar to the Blinn shader, and it has the same controls. Phong creates smooth surfaces with some amount of shininess, just as Blinn does. However, Phong does not handle highlights as well as Blinn. This is especially true for glancing highlights, where the edge of a surface catches the light. Phong is good for creating plastic objects, as well as many other surfaces.

Figure 7.29. The Oren-Nayar-Blinn shader

Figure 7.30. The Phong shader

Figure 7.31. The Strauss material

Figure 7.32. The Translucent shader

Strauss

The Strauss material (Figure 7.31) can create metallic and nonmetallic surfaces. Its main controls are Color, Glossiness, Metalness, and Opacity. The specular highlights, for the most part, are governed by the Glossiness of the material. The higher the Metalness value, the darker the unlit portions of the surface become, again relying on reflections for the metallic look.

Translucent

Translucence is where light is scattered as it passes through the material—for example, when a flashlight shines behind a sheet of parchment. The Translucent shader (Figure 7.32) is very similar to the Blinn; however, this shader adds a touch of translucency to the material.

You can also simulate frosted and etched glass by using translucency. Figure 7.33 shows the Material Editor for a Translucent shading material.

Figure 7.33. A Translucent shading material allows light to scatter through the object.

Let's put some of that hard-earned knowledge to work and map an object. You will be creating and texturing a pool ball. Although this may not seem the most exotic thing to texture, you can learn a lot about surfaces, shading, and mapping techniques by texturing it. You'll be able to flex your mapping muscles even more in exercises later in the chapter.

Starting the Pool Ball

You can begin with your own project, or you can copy the Pool Ball project found on the companion CD to your hard drive. It contains a texture image file you'll need for this exercise.

Choosing a Surface Type

The next step is to decide what the surface of your object is going to be. Will it be shiny or matte? You will need a shiny surface, because real pool balls are glossy. We will have to adjust the specular highlights using the Blinn's controls.

The material in the editor is now the material assigned to the object. If you were to change any of the parameters of the material, it would be instantly updated on the object. Once you assign a material, there's usually no need to return to the object's default color, although you may find yourself replacing the material with another material frequently.

Figure 7.34 shows you what the pool ball should look like, most noticeably its specular highlight. However, viewing in the viewport isn't the same as a rendered image. The viewport gives the lowest level of quality, and it should not be used to make final decisions on the look of your material. Instead, it should be used as a point of reference.

Figure 7.34. The pool ball in a viewport

Figure 7.35 shows this pool ball rendered. Rendering (covered in detail in Chapter 11) combines the materials, lights, shadows, and environments within a scene to create the final look. Notice how much more detailed the specular highlight is in the render. To check your render, click the Quick Render icon (

Figure 7.35. The pool ballrendered

Mapping the Pool Ball

This simple material is only part of the story. Just creating a sphere and making it shiny and green doesn't make a realistic ball. Pool balls have a graphic strip or number in a circle. You still need to add the markings of a real pool ball, not just a solid color. Figure 7.36 shows some real pool balls. You can't create the needed etail using the basic parameters of the Standard material. What you need is a bitmap.

Figure 7.36. Pool balls

This step has to do with texture placement. As you gain more experience, you'll learn how to prepare your texture images for your models. A bitmap replaces the diffuse color with an image. The image you use can be hand drawn and scanned, created in a program such as Adobe Photoshop, or taken with your digital camera. The image we are going to use (Figure 7.37) was created in Photoshop. A white circle with a "2" is in the middle and one that is cut in half is on either side.

Figure 7.37. The proposed bitmap texture for the ball

The theory behind this image is quite simple. Pool balls have the number on opposite sides of the ball. In your texture map, you'll need to make two 2s in the blue backdrop. The two halves of the white circle and the 2 will simply tile together when the texture image wraps around the sphere, much like how a wrapper wraps around a piece of candy. This way you have two 2s on the ball, easy as pie. To apply this bitmap as a texture, follow along here:

Adding a Finishing Touch—Reflection Mapping

With the image applied, the pool ball looks pretty good at this point (Figure 7.42)—but it's not perfect. The small nuances are what really make a render look good. One thing this pool ball is missing is a reflection of its environment. Now, short of creating and texturing a pool table and several other pool balls, we need to make a cheat.

There are two ways to create reflections: the "faking it" method (using mapping) and the raytrace method. Both methods require us to go to the Maps rollout in the Material Editor. We are going to use the cheat and add a bitmap into the Reflections Map slot. We are going to use the "faking it" method.

Figure 7.43. The reflection map used to "cheat" the reflections on the pool ball

This image has all the elements that you might see around a pool ball—specifically, more pool balls! To add this image as a reflection for the ball, follow these steps:

Figure 7.44. The reflections are a bit heavy. If you could reduce the amount of reflection, they'd be better.

Figure 7.45. The reflections look much better and add a certain realism to the pool ball.

You may notice that the background in the renders in Figures 7.44 and 7.45 are white, whereas your renders' backgrounds are (probably) black. There are many reasons why you would want to control the background color, which you can do with a simple setting change. You may want a specific color to offset your scene (for example, blue to represent the sky) or you may want a picture in your background.

To change the background of your renders, go to the main menu and choose Rendering → Environment (Figure 7.46). The Background parameter is at the top of the dialog box. Click on the color swatch and choose your color. That's it!

To add an image to the background, click on the bar marked None to add a bitmap, just as you did with the bitmaps on the pool ball. Once you do, the image will render in the background with your scene. To change the image, click that bar, which at that point should list the path and filename of the current image, to take you to the Material/Map browser where you can select a new bitmap and image.

Figure 7.46. Choose Rendering → Environment.

Now that you know how to add maps to a material, removing them is very simple. In the Material Editor for the parent material's parameters (not the map's parameters), you can right-click on the map name, as shown in Figure 7.47, to select Clear from the context menu.

If you don't want to clear the map entirely, but just need to turn it off for a little while, you can just uncheck the box to the left of the parameter name, as shown in Figure 7.48. Check it back on to use that map again.

Figure 7.47. Removing a map from a parameter

Figure 7.48. Unchecking the box next to a mapped parameter will temporarily remove the map from the parameter.

Seeing More Sample Slots

If you have a scene with several materials, and you need to see more sample slots than the default in the Material Editor, simply right-click on any slot and select either 5 × 3 Sample Windows or 6 × 4 Sample Windows from the context menu. This will help you navigate a heavy scene that has tons of materials that you need to modify. In the following graphics, you can see the sample slots multiply!

Here's what 5 × 3 Sample Windows looks like.

And here's what 6 × 4 Sample Windows looks like.

Figure 7.49. Magnify gives you a larger view of your material.

As you've seen, the sample slots for any given material in the Material Editor constantly update to show you any changes you've made to that material. However, if you want a larger image than the relatively small sample slot, doubleclick on the slot or right-click on the slot and select Magnify from the context menu, as shown in Figure 7.49. 3ds Max will open a larger window (Figure 7.50), which is resized by dragging the corners of the window, with a sample of that material. It will by default update automatically as you make changes to the material.

Figure 7.50. A larger view of your material sample

You've already noticed that there are only 24 sample slots in the Material Editor. This does not limit the number of materials you can use to 24. You should consider the Material Editor as a scratchpad of sorts. You can create as many materials as you'd like in a 3ds Max scene; however, only 24 can be loaded in the Material Editor window at the same time.

If you click the Get Material button in the Material Editor, you can list all the materials that are used in the scene. When the Material/Map browser is open, click the Scene radio button for the Browse From parameter, and all of the materials assigned in the scene will be listed. When an object's material is not shown in a sample slot, it does not mean it has been deleted. You can load it back into any sample slot for editing at any time.

Assigning Materials to Sub-Objects

You've seen several times how to assign a material to an object. You can, for instance, drag the material from the Material Editor to the object in a viewport. You can also select an object in the viewport, and then select a Sample Slot material and click the Assign Material to Selection button (

You may want to assign materials to sub-object polygons as well as whole objects. One approach is to use the Multi/Sub-Object material type briefly discussed earlier in the chapter.

There is a much easier way to assign materials to sub-objects, however. Just select the appropriate polygons on the surface (the object must be an editable mesh or poly, or have an Edit Mesh/Edit Poly modifier applied), and assign the material as you regularly would (using the Assign Material to Selection button or dragging the material to the selected polygons in the viewport). A sphere with several polygons assigned to different materials is shown in Figure 7.51.

Figure 7.51. Applying materials to a mesh's subobject polygons is easy.

Once you apply a material to a sub-object, a new Multi/Sub-Object material is created in the scene automatically. You can load the new Multi/Sub-Object material by using the eyedropper to click on the object in the viewport to load the material into a sample slot.

Maps

By now you've noticed that the Material/Map browser has different maps you can access. These maps are divided into categories.

You've already used the bitmap map a few times. Let's take a look at the rest of the maps by category. Open the Material/Map browser. The categories are listed on the left. By default, All is selected as shown here.

The categories and their more important maps are explained in the following sections.

2D Maps

2D maps are two-dimensional images that are typically mapped onto the surface of geometric objects or used as environment maps to create a background for the scene. The simplest 2D maps are bitmaps; other kinds of 2D maps are generated procedurally.

Procedural maps are generated entirely within 3ds Max and rely on a set of parameters you set for their look. Images brought in the way the pool ball's color and reflection maps were brought in are not procedural maps. They are bitmaps—that is, raster image files. For more on raster image files, see Chapter 1.

Click on the 2D Maps category in the Material/Map browser to see the available 2D maps.

Bitmap

As you've already seen, a bitmap is an image file that you load into 3ds Max. It can be a photo, a scan, or any image that is readable by 3ds Max.

Checker

A procedural map, the checker map is a checkerboard pattern that is generated in 3ds Max. Its parameters in the Material Editor, which are shown in Figure 7.52, control the look of the checkerboard.

Figure 7.52. The checkerboard pattern

The Tiling values under the Coordinates rollout determine the number of checkers. The higher the number, the more checkers. Color #1 and Color #2, of course, control the two colors of the checkerboard; black and white are defaults. You can either click the color swatch to change the color, or you can click the Map bars (labeled None until you assign a map) next to each color. The Blur parameter allows you to blur the edges of the checkers, and the Soften parameter under the Checker Parameters rollout blurs the checkers together.

Gradient

A gradient is a procedural map (the parameters are shown in Figure 7.53) that grades from one color to a second color that grades to a third color.

Figure 7.53. The Gradient map

In the Coordinates rollout, the parameters are much the same as they are for the checker map. These coordinates are pretty much the same for all procedural maps, as they allow you to position the map as you need on the object by setting the options such as Tiling and Offset.

The colors for the gradient are set by Color #1, Color #2, and Color #3. You can also map these colors. The Color 2 Position parameter sets the relative location of the middle color to the upper and lower colors—i.e., 0.5 is the middle because the other colors are at 0 and 1.0.

Gradient Ramp

Similar to the Gradient map, but much more powerful, the Gradient Ramp is a procedural map that allows you to grade from and to any number of grayscale shades. Gradient Ramps are perfect for creating maps that fall off (for example, for opacity effects where the opacity fades away). See Figure 7.54.

Use the sliders along the ramp in the Material Editor to set the position of the gray value. Click in the ramp to create a new slider at that grayscale value. The Black and White sliders at the very ends do not move. To delete a slider, right-click on it, and choose Delete from the context menu that appears. Notice the value and position readout above the ramp.

3D Maps

Similar to 2D maps that are generated in two dimensions, 3D maps are patterns generated procedurally in all three dimensions. For example, Marble has a grain that goes through the assigned geometry in X, Y, and Z. If you cut away part of an object with Marble assigned as its texture, the grain in the cutaway portion matches the grain on the object's exterior.

Figure 7.54. The Gradient Ramp

When you create a 3D map, notice that the Coordinates rollout has Tiling and Offset parameters in three axes, whereas the 2D maps only have X and Y.

Try using some of the 3D maps (such as Marble, Wave, Stucco, and Wood) to see how they work on a simple object in your scene. They all have basically the same Coordinates rollout; however, each has its own Parameters rollout to control the color and other settings.

Marble

A Marble map creates veins of colors that run through an object. The 3D aspect of the map allows it to spread across all three dimensions, creating a more realistic texture. Color #1 and Color #2 control the two colors of a Marble map, while the third color is a grainy blend of the two together, shown in Figure 7.55.

Figure 7.55. The Marble map

Noise

Noise is a great way to easily add some randomness to a parameter or to add a bit of randomness to a surface's color or specular highlight, for example. See Figure 7.56.

Figure 7.56. The Noise effect

Used sparingly, noise can add great detail to highlights for any shiny object when mapped to the specular color. In this case, just make sure the colors in the noise do not contrast too much against each other, which would make the map faint.

Wood

Wood is a quick way to add wood grain to a material. See Figure 7.57.

Figure 7.57. The Wood effect

Just like with the Marble map, you can set the color of the wood grain with Color #1 and Color #2. Adding Radial Noise and Axial Noise will make the wood appear to have more burls.

Compositor and Color Modifier Maps

In image processing, compositing images refers to superimposing two or more images to combine them in a variety of ways. In CG, compositors are meant specifically for compositing colors or maps together for some advanced effects. Color Modifier maps alter the color of pixels in a material for some advanced effects. Color modifiers and compositor maps will not be covered in this book.

Opacity mapping allows you to cut out parts of an object by making those parts invisible. You can also create wonderful fading effects using opacity maps. With opacity mapping, you don't have to model certain details, which can be a real time saver. In this example, you will create a chain-link fence. However, you will not model a fence. You will create it entirely from mapping. To make a chain-link fence, follow these steps:

Figure 7.58. The chain-link texture

You can see immediately how useful opacity mapping can be. 3ds Max uses the white portions of the image map to display full opacity, whereas the black areas become transparent. If you did not have an opacity file such as the one in this exercise, you could easily create one by painting a black-and-white matte of the color image that you are using for the material.

In a previous exercise, you turned a boring sphere into an exciting pool ball using Diffuse and Reflection maps. Now let's dive into mapping the rocket we modeled in Chapter 5 to get it ready for lighting and rendering in Chapters 10 and 11, respectively.

Study the full-color image of the rocket shown in Figure 7.61. (It's also shown in the Color Section of this book.) That will give you an idea of how the rocket is to be textured. Let's begin with the wheels.

Figure 7.61. Let's texture the rocket!

The Wheels

The wheels of the real toy rocket are made of plastic that is fairly smooth, shiny and reflective. The black tires are different from the wheels: they have a rough, bumpy surface (Figure 7.62). The bumpiness breaks up the shininess, similar to what happens when you throw a handful of sand into a pool of water. The surface is still shiny and reflective but is distorted by the bumpiness, giving an appearance of a slightly matte finish.

Since the tire was created from a single primitive, and then modified, we don't have separate objects to which to apply materials. One option is to break apart the object so it has distinct areas (distinct objects), but this method adds an extra complication because we have to manage more objects. To avoid this, we are going to use a texturing technique using Multi/Sub-Object (MSO) materials. This material was explained earlier in the chapter; now let's put it into practice.

Figure 7.62. The tire is a rough black plastic

Selecting Polygons and Named Selection Sets

With a Multi/Sub-Object material, you select the polygons on the objects you want to assign a particular type of material, as opposed to selecting the entire object. The hardest part of creating an MSO material is selecting those polygons. However, there are a fewthings that will make selecting at a sub-object level easier.

Selecting by region (see Chapter 3, "The 3ds Max Interface," under the Selection Tools Icons) allows you to use the mouse to select one or more objects by defining an outline or area, instead of simply clicking them. There are five different types of regions from which to choose; the default is a rectangle marquee. For this task, your best bet is probably to use the Lasso region selection (which works just like the Lasso tool in Adobe Photoshop) to select the polygons around the wheel that demarcate the tire portion of the wheel.

Creating a Multi-Sub Object Material

Now that you have made your selections for the wheel, you will create the Multi/ Sub-Object material for the wheel, consisting of three distinct parts: black tire, white hubcap, and red bolt.

Although there are different ways to create a Multi/Sub-Object material, this method of creating an MSO material is perhaps the most straightforward and the easiest to implement in this scenario.

Loading the MSO Material into the Material Editor

Congratulations! You have created a Multi/Sub-Object material, even though it may not appear that way. What you did was create three separate materials and apply them to subobjects on the Wheel object. What 3ds Max did was work behind the scenes to create the MSO material. How mysterious! The three materials you see in the Material Editor are now just instances of the main or parent material called the Multi Sub-Object material. We will load this material into the ME so you can see it in the following steps.

Fine-Tuning the Materials

Figure 7.71. The Multi/Sub-Object material for the wheel

The rendered result (shown in Figure 7.72) looks a bit flat. Specular highlights help make a 3D object look real, but highlights don't show up on flat surfaces.

Figure 7.72. The rendered wheel is a bit flat looking.

For example, in Figure 7.73, you can see three cylinder objects of varying flatness. The cylinder with the most rounded sides shows the highlight the most.

Figure 7.73. Flat objects do not show off their specular highlights particularlywell.

You can see a highlight on the black tire part of the wheel, but there's no highlight anywhere on the white hubcap and only a little highlight on the red bolt. One solution is to add more curves to your model to try to bring out the specular; another solution is to change your material somehow. This decision can be made depending on how close you will see the wheel in any of your shots. If the wheel is only seen from a distance, there is no need to further detail the model. Because we will only be seeing the wheel from a distance, we will alter the material. We can add a few things to bring out the shine in the material.

Usually shiny objects are also reflective, so if we add reflections to the flat hubcap surface, the render would look more convincing. As with the Pool Ball exercise earlier in the chapter, you can fake the reflections for a very convincing result, especially when you do not have a full CG environment built for the rocket that would allow true raytraced reflections (for more on raytracing, see Chapter 11).

To assign a reflection map to the wheel, follow along.

Figure 7.74. The wheel rendered with mapped reflections

The mapped reflection helps give the wheel more substance as it makes the material more convincing when rendered. A true reflection, as you will see with raytracing in Chapter 11 "3ds Max Rendering", will give you more accurate reflections, provided you are rendering in a created environment, which we are not. Figure 7.75 shows an example of a raytraced reflection and rendered in a simple 3D room. The wheel on the left is the fake mapped reflection; the wheel on the right is the raytraced reflection showing the accurate environment.

Figure 7.75. The wheel on the left has a mapped reflection, and the wheel on the right has a raytraced reflection.

Applying a Bump Map

We are almost but not totally done with the wheel. The black part of the wheel is only halfway there. One important feature of the wheel is the bumpiness on the surface (refer to Figure 7.62 on page 334). This bumpiness changes all the Specular and Reflective properties on that part of the wheel. Bump mapping is very common in CG. It adds a level of detail to an object fairly easily by creating bumps and grooves in the surface and giving the object a tactile element. Bump mapping uses the intensity values (aka the brightness values) of an image or procedural map to simulate bumpiness on the surface of the model, without changing the actual topology of the model itself. You can create some surface texture with a bump map; however, you will not be able to create extreme depth in the model. For that, you may want to model the surface depth manually or use displacement mappinginstead. To add a bump map to the tire, follow these steps:

Figure 7.76. Add a bump map to the tire.

The wheel is complete!

Now you'll need to apply the MSO material you created to the other three wheels. There's a hard way to do this—and an easy way. The hard way is to select the polygons for the tire, the hubcap, and the bolt for each wheel, and apply the MSO material The easy way is to copy the finished wheel, place it where the other three wheels are located, and delete the original wheels. Just make sure to unhide the rest of the rocket using the Layer Manager.

Creating Material Libraries

While a material is in the Material Editor or applied to an object, it is part of the scene and is saved with the scene, whether it is displayed in a sample slot in the Material Editor or not. However, for complicated scenes, it is inconvenient to have all the materials active in the Material Editor, because you are limited to only 24 sample slots. Once you get to your twenty-fifth material, you will have to store some of the materials elsewhere, such as a material library, to make available slots for editing in the Material Editor. You can later bring those stored materials back into the Material Editor easily.

To create a material library:

You can load the scene file Rocket_Material_Wheel_Final.max from the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project to skip to this point or to check your work.

Mapping the Fins: Introduction to Mapping Coordinates

An image map is two-dimensional; it has length and width but no depth. Geometry in 3ds Max, however, extends in all three axes. How is a material that contains 2D image maps applied properly to a 3D scene object? Are the maps projected in a single direction onto the object's surfaces or do they envelop the object cylindrically or spherically? The answer depends on the type of mapping coordinates applied to the object. Mapping coordinates define how and where image maps are projected onto an object's surfaces and whether the maps are repeated across those surfaces.

Mapping coordinates can be applied to objects in several ways. The Generate Mapping Coords option is on by default. When primitive objects are created and the Generate Mapping Coords option is checked at the bottom of the Parameters rollout, the appropriate mapping coordinates are created automatically.

Loft objects, which are covered in Chapter 5, "Modeling in 3ds Max: Part II," control mapping in the Mapping section of the Surface Parameters rollout. The Length Repeat value determines how many times the material's maps are repeated along the length of the Path object, and the Width Repeat value determines how many times the maps are repeated around the scene object.

The Base Material

The top vertical fin on the rocket's tail is nothing special as far as materials are concerned. It is a white plastic that is just a bit shiny and has a decal, as you can see in Figure 7.79. At this point, you easily can create the material itself:

Figure 7.79. The top vertical fin of the rocket

Figure 7.80. Turn the Reflection amount down to 35 to achieve thisrender.

Adding the Decal

The main feature of this vertical fin is its decal. This is an image that we need to add to the material. The image is a 2D image and won't be as easy to apply as the 3D noise map we used earlier for the bump map of the tire. The decal will become a part of the Diffuse color; we will replace the color we created for Diffuse with the image itself.

The size and placement of the decal are not bad, but there are still copies of the decal on all the sides of the top fin, as shown in Figure 7.83.

Figure 7.83. Copies of the decal are still on all sides of the top fin.

This happened because the model for the top fin started out as a box with six sides, so the Material Editor put a decal on each side of the geometry. This method works if the bitmap image has a random pattern, and you don't mind having that image on all sides of the object. Here, the mapping coordinates inherent in the top fin geometry will not allow us to place the decal on just the sides of the fin.

In the next section, we will use a modifier to change the mapping coordinates on the Top Fin object.

Using a UVW Modifier

Instead of dealing with the surface's own mapping coordinates as we have tried here, we are going to use a modifier to replace those coordinates on the geometry. The UVW Map modifier makes the decal act more like a real decal that we can control by moving a modifier gizmo around to place the coordinates as we please. (For more on UVW Mapping, see the sidebar "Understanding UVW Mapping" later in this chapter.)

The UVW Map modifier is a common method for applying and controlling mapping coordinates. You select the type of mapping projection, regardless of the shape of the object, and then set the amount of tiling in the modifier's parameters. The mapping coordinates applied through the UVW Map modifier override any other mapping coordinates applied to an object, and the Tiling values set for the modifier are multiplied by the Tiling value set in the assigned material. Figure 7.84 shows the parameters for the UVW modifier.

Figure 7.84. The UVW Modifier's parameters

CREATING THE UVW MAP MODIFIER

To use the UVW Map Modifier to properly map the decal to the fin, follow these steps.

ADJUSTING THE UVW MAP GIZMO

Now we will adjust the UVW Map Gizmo in the following steps:

CORRECTING THE PROJECTION

While the decal on this side of the fin looks fine, if you look on the other side of the fin, the decal is flipped. The type of UVW Map modifier projection we are using (Planar projection) is useful only when one side of an object needs to be mapped. In this case we need the decal to show up correctly on the other side of the Fin. What do we do now?!?

ADDING THE MATERIAL TO THE MATERIAL LIBRARY

This is a good time to add this decal material to the Material Library.

Mapping the Body

The rocket body is made up of three texturing areas:

The easiest way to texture is to use the Multi-Sub Object Material technique you used on the wheel. The body has a logo on it, so it will have the same issue as the Fin: The logo image will appear on the opposite side of the object when you use Planar mapping. Another way of dealing with the logo-flipping issue is to apply the material to each side separately. You would apply the same material to specific selected polygons on each side of the object, but 3ds Max lets you apply two maps and two UVW Map modifiers instead of one. This gives you independent control over each side of the rocket body.

The Seat and Control Panel polygons are also selected now. We want to deselect them for now. To do this, go to the Modify panel and, in the Selection rollout, check Ignore Backfacing. This allows you to select only the polygons facing you. Hold down Alt while you select what you want to subtract from any selection. This can be a bit tedious, but it must be done. Once finished, your selection should resemble Figure 7.92.

Figure 7.92. Select one half of the rocket's body, without the seat or control panel polygons.

Creating the Material

We'll begin by creating a material for the red body.

The model still needs mapping coordinates. We will get to them later.

Flipping the Decal

In the following steps, we will create a copy of the one side's material and flip it for the other side.

Adding a Seat

We don't have to worry about mapping the polygons of the seat for the rocket because we have a model of a seat to add.

Choose File → Merge, navigate to the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project, and select the file Seat.max to merge in the seat geometry, as shown in Figure 7.98. The extra geometry adds detail to the model by giving it a nicer seat. If you had to, you could forego the seat geometry, instead selecting the seat polygons and assigning a glossy black material to them.

Figure 7.97. A render of the rocket shows how the decal is mapped on the body.

Figure 7.98. Adding the seat

The Control panel and Nose materials still need to be created and added to the model.

The Control Panel

In this section, we will texture the Control panel.

Because the buttons of the Control panel are separate objects, you easily can create colorful materials for them, using more or less the same settings from the previous materials. Simply assign each button its own material for its own distinctive color.

Voilà! All that remains now are the thruster and the nose of the rocket.

Bring on the Nose, Bring on the Funk

The material for the nose is pretty similar to the material we just created for the Control panel, except the Diffuse color should be white.

The Thruster

The final part of the rocket model to texture is the Thruster. Using the experience you've already gained from texturing the rest of the rocket, this will be a breeze. If you prefer, you can load the Rocket_Material_Thruster_Start.max file from the Scenes folder of the Red ocket project, or just continue with your own scene.

Figure 7.101 shows the thruster. Notice the round bulbous section in the left of the image. This is the middle yellow part of the thruster.

Figure 7.101. The Thruster object has a yellow part, the circle in the middle, and the outside housing.

All the parts of the rocket now have materials applied.

If you are in the Rocket_Material_Thruster_Start.max or the Rocket_Material_Thruster_ Final.max file, open the Layer Manager and unhide all the other parts of the body. They should all be textured as well. You can also open the scene file Rocket_Material_Final.max to check your work. You may find all these scene files in the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project.

Creating materials for your objects is usually the next step after modeling them. Creating materials can give you a sense of accomplishment because it is essentially the last step in making the object look as you envisioned—aside from lighting and rendering, of course.

There are several ways to create materials, from simple colors to complex mappings on distinct parameters. Finding the right combination of maps, shader types, and material types can make a world of difference in the look of your scenes. It's important to remember that like everything else in CG, applying materials takes time, and gaining wisdom with your materials and maps will come with practice.

In this chapter, you learned the basics of materials, what kinds of materials are in 3ds Max, and how to create and edit them in the Material Editor. Then, you learned how choosing the right type of shader will make your surface look right, and how to apply your knowledge to mapping a pool ball, reflections and all. Next, you learned a few more tricks with the Material Editor and found out about the different kinds of maps available in 3ds Max. With that knowledge, you mapped the entire rocket you modeled in Chapter 5, and readied it for its next step, lighting in Chapter 10.

If you'd like some additional practice, go back and adjust all the materials on the rocket with different types of materials, colors, and settings to see how they affect the render of the rocket. So far we've done all this with a minimal lighting setup. As you will see in Chapter 10, "3ds Max Lighting," lighting plays a vital role in how you texture your model. Soon you'll find yourself tweaking settings for the specular highlights, reflections, color, and so on asyou change your lighting environment to gain the best render.