Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll use gradient to vary the color over the surface of our objects. So right now we have different materials assigned to the different pieces of our object, but we would like to vary that color over the objects. One of the simplest ways that we can do this is to use a gradient ramp. So let's open up our material editor, and I want to come down to work on the material for, let's say the rear cone. Going I'm going to go and select the cone itself, and let's just go into isolation mode. So we can see here the cone that we've got. If we go ahead and pick that material from the cone, you can see it focuses on the material that's currently applied. So this is our rear cone material. So what we'd like to do now is create a variation for this cone. So I want to make it dark on the inside, and then I want to make it lighter as it comes out to the end, OK? So to do this, we can use a gradient ramp. And we're going to be working with the color, so we want to pipe it into the diffuse color. So again, we can either just pull out from here, or we can go ahead and grab our gradient ramp from the maps list. Go ahead and pull it in. All right. You can see it comes with all of these different controllers. If you want to hide those, you can go ahead and right click down here, and say hide child trees. And it'll go ahead and hide those. We can pipe this gradient into the diffuse. If it doesn't show up in here, we can go ahead and select, let's see, right here, show standard map in view port. And you can also up here, show materials standards play with maps, if your maps doesn't show up. So right now it's going from black to white around the side. And if we take a look at our map, and we'll just double click on that, you can see here we have one color defined on one side of our gradient ramp, and inside of our parameters. And then that's going from black, and then all the way to the right is white. And we've got a gray value in here. We can move that around, we can also add additional colors. But right now it's not being mapped correctly. So it's mapping from one side to the other. Now, this cone has mapping coordinates already assigned to it. So it's actually using an explicit map channel to define how this is being applied. Right now it's using UV. Let's go to be VW. And that will actually change this, so that the gradient takes place from this side to this side. So now we have a gradient from black to white going from the flat part to the point. Now, we can change this up. If we want to add a little bit of color in here, we can click on any of these colors. And let's just add a little bit of blue into this. Real subtle blue or green. Make that a little bit more gray. So we get a little bit more of kind of a metal color. We can maybe add a little bit of blue into this, as well. Kind of bringing this in. And then maybe the black is fairly black. We can add another variation in here if we want to bring this in, and maybe give that a little bit more color, but still very dark. But maybe a little bit more saturated. So we can add variations in here, and you can see how that's reflected here in our view. If we exit isolation mode, you can see that we're not really seeing any of that darkness coming out here. OK. So what we can do is take our gradient and just move it towards the light end, and that will start to bring that darkness up towards the end. And you can see that blue coming in there now. Let me just delete this one I just added. Again, I can grab that and I just pull this up a little bit, depending on where you want that. So you can see now you're starting to get the darkness in there. We can do the same thing on our engine interior. So I'm going to just grab this and isolate it. This was created from a NURBS curve. So what we can do is, I want to create some kind of shadowing and shading using a gradient ramp. So again, I'll just select that. It's going to focus in on that material that's currently associated with our engine inner. Let's grab our gradient ramp, and let's, in this case, go ahead and just pull out from our diffuse color, and we'll grab a gradient ramp that way. It's a little bit different way of working, and so right now, we want to go ahead and make sure that that's being shown. This is actually set up correctly, it's going from black to white, but now we just need to define this a little bit more. So I'm going to try to get to the point where we can look at both of these at the same time here. And we're working with some limited screen space here, but we should be able to make it work. Right now, we're going from black to white, and that's one of the things I should mention about the slate editor. You need to make sure, even though we're looking at the new material here, this is still the old material. So if we were to start going in and editing this, we're actually editing that material we were just working on. So you want to make sure that you double click this to get the new parameters up here for our new material. And in fact, we want the gradient, so we'll go ahead and click on that. So here, you can see the black to white. What I want to do now is start to add some divisions in here and tighten things up. So I want the color, I want to have the shadowing over here, that's fine, but I want to tighten that up a little bit. I want to add maybe a little bit of shadowing in here. So I'll just go ahead and click, and make that a darker color, and bring that in the shadow area there. I'll maybe tighten that up by bringing this light color back here. You can see how I can start to build this gradient. I also want a shadow area in here. So, somewhere along this area up here, I'll go ahead and bring that black down. And depending on the type of object that you have, you may not be able to make it work like this because of the UVs. If you've got something that's explicitly laid out in the UVs in a particular way and you're using the explicit map channel, it may not be able to go just from one end to the other evenly. You may not be able to do that. In this case, because the way we would built our object, we do have that ability. So, go ahead and bring another one up against this. And you can see how bringing this up tightens that up a little bit. And you can see where that line is right there, so let's move that over. Go ahead and move this over, move that over so the darkness starts right inside there. We're just faking some shadowing here almost. Create a new one in here, bring that over, same thing here, bring that up. And then over here, let's create some dirt and shadowing on this side. So we'll bring this down, and then let's make this a darker value here. I'll go ahead and bring this down here, make this a bit darker, add to a little bit of that grime there on the inside. All right. And so we can just create some custom occlusion almost, and custom shadowing here just by using our gradients. And if you want to add color to this, of course you can make these whatever color you want. We just happen to be using gray right now. If we want to add a little bit more of that blue in here, we can go ahead and drop some blue in there and just start to add a little bit of that in. You can see how we can start to add that. Just adding a little bit of that blue. Maybe not so much. OK, and then same thing here. Adding a little bit of that blue, kind of metallic color. And then maybe right over here, let's do the same thing. Just add a little bit of that blue. OK, so you can deal with color as well, not just adding shadow and shading. But gradients are a great way to quickly add some detail to our material. So one other thing that we want to look at here now is looking at the cable. So let's take a look at our cable. And let's kind of zoom up on here. So let's go ahead and add a gradient to this cable. So I'm going to go ahead and sample that. And here's our cable. And this is actually, I've separated this out into engine and cockpit, and I actually have that loaded up in another view . So I'm going to go ahead and delete it from this engine view, and go to the cockpit view. Just so we've got some of the materials separated out a little bit more. Let's drop in our gradient, and we'll use the gradient ramp to get a little bit more control over it. Let's drop it into the diffuse color. Double click on this, and let's just make a simple gradient from black to gray, to black again. So we'll click on the other end and make it black. And let's lighten up the inside a little bit. So now we have this gradient that instead of going from black to white, goes from black to a lighter shade, back down to black again. Let's make sure that we show this in the view. And right now it's being tiled along the length. So the tiling, we can see under coordinates. And so I'm going to go ahead and dial this up, and you can see by dialing that tiling up in the U, we've got multiple copies of this. And what I want to do now is rotate this. So I'm going to experiment with some of the rotation here. OK. And experiment with the tiling. So I'm going to tile this maybe 20 or so. Looking at that, and you can see the tiling in the V doesn't really matter right now. And let's kind of move this down a little bit. There we go. So what I can do is click on this rotate button, come in here, and I can rotate this around and get some different effects. So coming in here, rotating this around. And so you can see that we've got our gradient, and we're actually using multiple copies of this to rotate it around. So you can see how this is kind of twisted now. We can go ahead and increase the tiling of that. We can, again, increase the rotation in the U, the V, and the W. And just experiment with something that looks like what you want. If it's not quite tight enough, we can increase the tiling a bit more until we get something that is twisted the way that we want. So that gives us, again, we're just working with a single gradient here. This black to light to black, but we're tiling it. We're repeating it along this cable, and then we're rotating it. And so the numbers, if you want to plug these numbers in, but I just kind of rotated it around until I got something that looked a little bit closer to what I wanted. And you can do the same thing. And depending on the scale, you may want those twists to be smaller. That's up to you. But again, that's just playing with the coordinates, and setting up those coordinates so that we get our gradient just applied in a different way. All right, so play around with gradient ramps, as far as modulating the color on your different objects. The next thing that we're going to do is look at how we can add multiple materials to different objects. So in some cases, we may have objects that different parts of the objects may need to be different materials. Well, how do we do that? How do we go about telling Max what material we want to apply to what part of the object? So let's go ahead and take a look at that in the next lesson.