|
Tutorial e-mail
: matt@phantom-works.com |
|||
|
|||
|
|
||||||||
|
There are obviously several different approaches to texturing your work. I happen to like the easy and quick methods. So that's what I will be showing you today. What I will be covering in this tutorial.
|
||||||||
|
Next we need to create the two materials we want to blend together. This is where the Robots and Ships CD comes in handy. I have picked the hull008.jpg titled texture for my main color map. So we'll make a standard color map with the hull008.jpg tile as a Bitmap texture in the Diffuse color slot. We also want this to have some texture to it so I will also add the hull008b.jpg Bump which is already created for me on the CD. After some adjusting we have a really tight looking bumpy blue metal texture armor for our robot. We'll name this material Blue Robot Armor. But since this isn't some sissy robot I want him to have some dirty rusty spots and look like he's the real thing out there in space working.
Since we want our Robot to be blue we want very little of the Robot Underside material to show. In fact, I only want it to show in between the cracks where the plates on the texture map are joined. Thanks to our bump map those will already be decreased and I want them to basically look like they have rusty beat up edges. So we need to take the bump map we used for hull008b.jpg map in the Blue Robot Armor material and make it into a mask. (Don't worry about the Use Curve Function. When using a Map Mask this will not be an issue.) To do this we are going to have to go into Photoshop and do some tweaking to the hull008b.jpg Bump map to give it the higher contrast we need for it to work as a mask. Open Photoshop and open the file called hull008b.jpg that we used earlier. We are going to have to adjust the levels of this image so we get a higher contrast between white and black. So go to Image/Levels. Here we are going to adjust the levels to something like this. After adjusting the levels Invert the image so what was white is now black.
Since we have used
a Texture we are going to need to use a UVW map on the parts that receive
our material. This is because Max will need to know how to interpret the
coordinates of the map onto the geometry. We will need to select what
we want to assign the UVW map to and then go to the Modifier panel and
choose UVW map. We then have the option of using a Spherical Map, Planar
Map, Box Map, etc... Since our robots forearm is really close to a box
shape then Box Map will work really well.
This is the simplest method to use for an object like a box. But what if your object is more complex and you want to use a more sophisticated texture? Well that will require you to edit the UVW, which is exactly what we will do next.
So we create a new material called Leg Upper. I have decided to only use this texture as a bump map and use a more uniform pattern for the color. So this time when we apply the map we want to go into the bump map and turn on the Show Map in Viewport button. After applying our UVW Box mapping we then want to go to the Modifier and pic UVW Unwrap. From here we will click on the Edit button down below. Once we hit edit we are taken to the Edit UVW's window. Because we used Box Mapping on this leg we can see all the sides of the box drawn as flattened shapes. But we are only concerned with the front of the leg, which is where the fine detail of this image will show. After some trial and error I finally grabbed the correct handles for the front of the leg and I stretched the image out to position it just right on the leg. Because we turned on show texture in viewport earlier we can interactively see what is happening and make sure we get things lined up properly. After that its just a matter of repeating these steps until the Robot is complete. I hope you learned at least one thing from this tutorial. : )
Feel free to check out my website or send me an email if you have some questions. matt@phantom-works.com |
||||||||
3D
Studio Max 5.0 Tutorial
We
are going to start out creating a Blend Material for the Robots armor.
Fortunately since we are using a Robot we can assume that his manufacturing
process created tiled metal pieces. So it won't look bad or wrong if we
use some tiling textures to map him. We'll start by going into the Material
Editor and changing our standard map type to a blend Material. Click on
standard and the Material/Map Browser window will open. Choose Blend (second
one down) and click OK. We'll name this material Robot Armor and then
just let it sit there while we move on. 
So
now we need to create the Sub Map for the Blend Material. So once again
we create a new material and look to our Texture CD for something good.
There are several dirty/rusty metal textures to choose from and I had
to experiment a little to see which looked the best. Darker metal under
the top coat tends not to show up well. So I decided to use map wall_006.jpg.
Now here we start to get a little tricky. To create the bump for this
material we have two choices. We can use the bump map for the Diffuse
color map which already been created on the CD. That would make the under
part have a different texture than the top part. That could look interesting
but what we really want is for the blue material to look like paint that
has chipped off and revealed the metal underneath. So even though we have
used a different Diffuse map we want to use the same Bump map for this
material as we did for our Blue Robot Armor material. This way
the bumping will match up and the effect will be more convincing. The
cool part about using the same map is that we can just steal it from our
other material.
Now name this Material Robot Underside. Just use the Material navigator
and drag Bump: Map#6 (hull008b.jpg) in to the bump slot for the Robot
Underside Material. A Window will ask if you want an Instance
or a copy. Click Instance and choose OK.
Now
we have 3 materials in our Material Editor. We have the outer shell Blue
Robot Armor, the metal under the paint Robot Underside, and
the empty Blend Material named Robot Armor. Combining these materials
together is a breeze. Click on the Blend Material and you will see three
empty boxes (Material #1, Material #2, and Mask). Now all you have to
do is drag Blue Robot Armor from the Material Editor into that
slot#1. A pop-up box will appear asking you if you want to Copy the Material
or instance the material. Choose instance. This will allow any changes
you make to the original material to automatically change the Blend Material.
Now do the same for the Robot Underside Material and place it in
slot#2. And you should now have a Blend Material that looks like the image
on the left. But wait! What do we put in the Mask slot? That is where
the real fun with Blend Materials happens. 
The
way Blend Materials work is that whatever is white on the Mask will allow
the other material to show throw in only those places. So with the inverted,
level adjusted image we can see that some of the Robot Underside
material will show through the Blue Robot Armor along the lines
of the tiled plates on the map and in the really rusty spots. You can
use different materials as Mask for the Blend. (You are not limited just
to texture maps. You can also try Prcedural textures. For instance. You
can try putting a splatter material in as a Mask and setting the base
color to black and the splats to White. that will give you a sort of spotty
looking robot material, like the image on the left.) Now all we need to
do is apply the map to our robot. 
After
assigning this to the object we can then go into the our material and
tell it to show us the texture on the object in the viewport. Go into
the Blue Robot Armor Material and click on the Diffuse Bitmap.
There you will see this icon. Click on the Show Map in Viewport button
to show the material in the viewport. 
