Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at some of the other kinds of materials that we could drop onto our objects. So up to this point, we've been using primarily the standard materials. And if we go into our Material editor, you can see that the materials that we have to choose from-- there a few different specialty materials, but not a lot of sort of preset materials that we can use. You can see we do have an architecture material, and so just in one of the views here-- I'll just drag this out-- we can see, if we jump up on here, that if we jump into the parameters here, you can see that under the User-Defined Templates, we can change our templates. And so we can get things like metal, which you can see changes some of the physical qualities of that material, masonry. We still need to drop in maps in order to better define what the surface looks like, but we can get some of the shader qualities defined here in the templates. So you can see how that changes the look. So that's one of the things that we can use. Now there are other materials that will be shown here if we change our renderer. So currently we're using the default scan line renderer. If we go up to Rendering, and we want to go to Render Setup. And let's change our renderer under the Common tab-- we'll go all the way to the bottom-- Assign Renderer. You can see it's right now set to Default Scan Line. If we change this to Mental Ray, we should get a number of new materials that we're able to use with this mental-ray renderer. So I'll say OK to that. Close that out. And you can see we have the standard rollout, which we had earlier, and now we also a mental-ray rollout right here. And also, under the Maps, we now have a Standard and then a Mental Ray maps. So we have maps that work specifically with mental ray. And you can see any number of those-- obviously too many to get into in this course, but just be aware that those are there. Also we have this Autodesk Material Library, which has a number of presets that we can use. So you can see we've got things like, if you want to get something like Porcelain. We've got porcelain presets here. We can open that up and see what that looks like. And if we take a look at this, it actually has some maps associated with it. So we can bring in a number of these different preset materials to be able to use. Go down here to-- we've got different kinds of flooring, different kinds of glass, masonry, metal, metallic paint. Let's go under Metal. We can look under aluminum, fabricated. You can see we have a number of different kinds of metals here. Brass, let me take a look at this brass. You can see what that looks like. So a number of different kinds of materials now that we can just drop in without having to do a lot of setting of parameters. So if I drop in this, for instance, this is going to be our aluminum. And it has even a specific anodized dark bronze satin. It's got specific qualities in here, and then you can see it's going to map a side here. Well, we can go ahead and name this something like "Pod Metal." And we can start to assign this to some of our objects. So let's say instead of this red, we want to have these bolts be this metal. And so you can see that they don't look that much different here, but if we were to go ahead and just quickly render-- and we're just going to do a quick render, here. We'll cover rendering more in a later section of this course. But you can see how now we get that reflectivity on there and the qualities based on that metal. So going back into our Material editor, that's now a scene material. We can go ahead and get rid of some of these other materials that we dropped in. So take a look at some of these materials. We've got a number of different types of metal, as I said earlier. Look at all that. You've got rust, you've got welds, things like that. Also, metal with paint, so if you want to have something that has some metallic paint-- so let's look at some of these. Some flaked paint, glossy, reflective, more of a satin. You can take a look something like this, where you get a metal paint like this. If you want to grab maybe some of these, maybe these guys, and assign this. And then, again, you won't see it exactly how it's going to be until you kind of render that out. And you can see how we get a really dark version with a little bit of spec. You can see that right in there. So it's really up to you as far as what kind of metal you want to add to that. I'm assuming it's going to be metal, but you can experiment with some of the other kinds of materials that you have. This is in the Autodesk Material Library. If you go back to our Mental Ray Materials, you can see we have some presets here for metal, glazing-- got a generic material here, stone. We have a car paint material if you're working on something that needs that sort of layered effect of car paint. We've also got subsurface scattering materials. There's one material on here that has a lot of presets-- the arc and design, architectural a design material. And you can see all the inputs that we have for that. If I double-click on that, you can see here we also have templates in this one. And so we've got different types of finishes, we've got things like rough concrete. So you can see that actually has that sort of rough look to it. Matte plastic, which is something that's closer to what we would get with our basic standard materials. Soft rubber. So within this one material, you've got a number of different preset that you can use. If you want to get something more transparent, you can get something like glass. And so let's say on this glass-- and let's look at a couple others, then we'll come back to the glass-- but we've got also chrome, which, a big part of chrome and some of these reflective metals is going to be the reflection and environment that you've got going on, so the preview may not give you exactly what you're looking for. You've got the brush metal in here, with the lines in there. So a lot of different options within this single material. So this is also a good one to look at-- the Arc and Design material. Let's go back to one of the glass materials. This is a physical glass. So looking at this, you can see it gives you a little explanation up here. "Refracting glass for solid objects with attenuation of light inside volumes requires caustics or segment and retrace shadows for best results." And then if we go up here to this thin geometry, this is going to be glass that's better for window panes, model the single faces, it doesn't do any refraction. So you can look at that. And let's say we want to add this to our window here. We can go ahead and assign that. And if we render this out, again, just with the default values there, you can see that it's very transparent. So you can experiment a little bit with the different types. So I can change this over now to solid geometry. And we render that, see what that looks like. And as you go through the rendering process, you'll probably want to go ahead and just tweak a lot of these materials anyway, because when you put your lighting in and everything, that's going to change. And we can change this up-- we can do a frosted glass, we can do our physical glass and see what that looks like. You can see here we don't have any of those attributes turned on. You could do kind of a frosted glass here. So you see how that's a little bit more frosted, a bit less clear. So you can see how that gets a little bit of a noise or frost pattern there. So you can experiment with that. You've also got the material parameters in here for the diffuse, for the reflectivity, for the transparency, and things like that. So just experiment with some of these things if you want to try to use the Arc and Design material. So just keep in mind, you can activate your mental-ray renderer and then you have a number of other options to be able to use. And just go through and experiment with some of these. You've got some other glass options in here. The Arc and Design's going to be a good one to try out. You've also got some subsurface, which we won't use too much on this project, because we're working with some hard surface stuff. But you also have the Autodesk Material Library that you can possibly go in and pick something out from. So a lot of different options to use in addition to the standard material that we can go in and tweak. So now that we've looked at some of just the basic materials that we can use and just drop without really doing too much in the way of changing parameters on those, let's now look at working with some procedural textures and piping those in-- things like noise in and more things like the gradient ramps that we looked at, additional maps that we can use to really change and modify and modulate the colors on our objects without paying a specific bitmap. So we'll take a look at that in the next lesson.