Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at using maps to drive the specularity of our objects. So again, taking a quick look at our object. And in this case, we'll just take a look at the large surface of the outer engine. We can see that the specular, the way the light shines on this object, is very even. So we get some nice clean panels, but it's really too clean. And so what we can do is break up the way that this light reacts with this using a map. So go into our Editor, and let's just grab the material, look at the material for the outer engine to begin with. And so we have a tile map piped into, or wired into, the diffuse color. We also have a tile dialed in to the bump. And then we have values for specular right here for our specular highlights. So right now it's a very, very low amount of specularity with a low degree of glossiness. We can make this more glossy by tightening up that specularity, but I think we want to keep it fairly wide. We can modulate the specular color here. So if we want to dial down the specular color, the specularity, we can take this down. We can actually pipe a map into this, and you can see by the square right next to it that we can actually do that. So let's get a noise map. So we'll go up here and grab a noise. Let's pipe this noise into the specular color. So now the specular color's going to be driven by this noise pattern. So let's take a look, and I'm going to just pull this off to the side here. Let's take a look now at just what this looks like with just the base noise added. You can't see a whole lot of difference here. So let's go ahead and take this, and we'll go ahead and go into the parameters. And let's dial down the size. So let's take this maybe in half to maybe 10 or so. And then let's take another look. We're not getting a lot going on here, so let's dial up the specularity of our material so that we can see it. And we'll just increase that glossiness. We'll dial it up all the way, and now we still get that even specularity. So let's continue to modify that. Let's take down the size. Let's take it all the way down to maybe two or so. Also, our scale may be off a little bit. So we'll go ahead and re-render that. And now once we start getting the size dialed in, you can start to see the variation in the specularity. So this isn't really in the color, is actually in the specularity. So that as we rotate around we would see that shine in different ways. So again, we're getting close, but I want it to be very small. So I'm going to actually change this down to, let's try 0.2 and re-render that. So now we're starting to get something that I think looks a little bit better as far as the metal goes. You've got areas that are more specular and areas which are a little bit less spectacular. So I think maybe something like 0.3 would work. I also want to take the colors and modify those a little bit. So maybe I'll take the white and move it down just a little bit into the gray. And we'll take the black and just lighten it up a little bit. So that the two colors are a little bit closer together so we don't have the drastic change there. And we'll go ahead and re-render that. OK, so just adding that little bit of modification to the specularity helps a lot. We can also take the specularity now down a little bit, and just dial that in to get it closer to what we want. We just want to have a little bit of variation in there for the specularity. And so we can continue to kind of modify that, we can maybe add a little bit of gloss there. We can go into the noise, the noise map itself, we could try out a fractal if we wanted to try a different noise type, and see what that looks like. That would give us something like that, which I think is pretty good. And so it just gives you a little bit more idea of scale. And it just breaks up that nice, smooth specular that we had, makes it look a little bit more realistic. Let's do the same thing on the interior of the engine, this piece here. If we just render this piece as is, and we haven't added the panels yet because I wanted to look at combining different types of maps together, which we'll look at in the next lesson. But just looking at this as-is with just the gradient ramp on it, you can see that we have something that is very sort of dull in here. So what we want to do is add some specularity and drive that specularity based on something like this, so to get kind of a metallic look. All right, so let's go ahead and grab our material here. So it's going to be this one. I'm going to just hide all these controllers. And so we have the gradient ramp piped into the diffuse. Let's grab another noise, pipe this into the specular color. Let's go ahead and set that size down to something we know should be a little bit closer to what we want. And I'll switch that over to fractal. And now let's do another render, keeping in mind the fact that this is pretty dry right here. I also want to make sure that I turn up that specular level here. So we'll go ahead and render this and see what that looks like. And so you can see, just by doing that we're getting much more of a metallic look with this sort of worn kind of noise pattern within the specularity, which gives it a nice look. Now we can go ahead and maybe size, maybe make this one a bit larger. We'll take the specularity down a bit, maybe take that up. And let's go ahead and just, again, dial these colors a little bit closer together, make this a little bit more subtle than what it may be before. We'll go ahead and re-render that. So you don't necessarily want it to be exactly the same as the one up here. I think I do want it to be maybe just a little bit shinier so I'll increase that up a little bit more. And then we'll go ahead and re-render. It gives it just a little bit more shine, but you can see how that just little bit of variation really helps in selling this as a sort of metal piece here. And you want to do the same thing on some of the other pieces that we've got here. So I would suggest probably not on these, maybe you want these to be little bit more shiny. But maybe on this one, this part of the cockpit, you'd want to go ahead and add that same type of effect just to the red material here. So you could add this, you can see the multi sub-object material here. So you'd want to add that noise into the specular color of the red material that you have here. So keep that in mind. We're starting to get maps and things piped into some different channels here. Modulating a specularity like that in many cases, especially if you're doing something like metal, can really help you make a more realistic looking material. So just keep that in mind as you go through. The next lesson we want to look at how we can start to combine some of these different maps. To this point, we've had a single map piped into a single channel. So for instance, we've got a bit map piped into this diffuse color. But what if we wanted to start layering some of these different maps together? So we have a gradient ramp, let's say we want to layer that with a tile. Or we want to layer that with a bit map and blend those all together. How can we do that? That's going to give us a lot more control and the ability to combine a lot of these different things that we've learned. And so let's go ahead and take a look at how we can do that in the next lesson.