3ds Max: Materials and Render Settings CRASH COURSE + Scene Files

hey everybody it's kyle with simulation lab here in brooklyn new york back again with another 3d studio max crash course guide on this time we're using we're going to be covering materials and some basic render settings that you can use when setting up your scenes for render this is like some tips and tricks that i use all the time when i'm making my personal digital art you know stuff like just just you know basic materials and lighting and stuff that i typically use for this kind of stuff um and of course my my you know professional work too doing things with architectural visualization and 3d motion graphics so yeah let's jump into max so i got max open first thing we're going to do real quick is customize our unit setup we're going to leave it as generic units if you're following along system units is one unit equals one inch and if you're brand new to 3d studio max i definitely recommend checking out the beginner's crash course guide on using 3d studio max it's a video i'll post a link in the description i also have a another video about how to 3d model pretty much anything so you can find that on my channel as well so if you've watched those and you're pretty much familiar with the general interface of max chances are you probably have popped up in the material editor and tried to you know render some stuff out and if you run into any trouble this will be a good video to start with as far as lighting and or sorry as materials and lighting and stuff like that goes so without further ado um we'll uh jump into max we'll kind of model a couple quick things and set up a little scene and uh and start playing around with some materials so first things first what i'm going to do is um i'm going to uh just create some spheres and turn on my edge faces and i'm not just going to change my segments to something like make it slightly more smooth you know and i'm going to copy this make four copies of this and maybe i'll copy this up as well i'm going to move the whole thing up these are just going to be some test spheres that we're going to toss some materials on pretty much um and so what i'll do is i'll create a little backdrop plane like that now center this guy out and get rid of all my length and width segments and i'll toss on an edit poly modifier on here i'm going to drive this back plane up we'll grab that back edge and toss a chamfer modifier on there set it to standard transfer chamfer and increase the amount pretty high up something like that should be good and i'll set my segments to like 40. boom all right and then real quick i'm going to go my top view and i'm just going to create a camera you guys can create a standard camera any kind of camera you want i'm eventually going to convert the scene to fstorm which is a different rendering engine and i'll explain some of that stuff later we're also going to be covering some basic render settings um further toward the end of the video further further along in the video here so i'm gonna go ahead and create a basic f storm camera i'll plop it in my scene there i'll grab the pivot and the camera itself and just zero out the x and then i'm just going to raise this guy up raise it up a little bit more or something like that and i'm going to set my camera here from my view my viewport port here to see through my camera and change this to default shading awesome now we're ready to rock and roll so a couple things with the material editor you can bring it up with the m key so you just type m brings up the material editor and again you can find that material editor here little click click on the little toolbar icon there it'll pop it up there's a couple different types of material letters which will cover which each one kind of does so this is the standard material editor if you just you know install mac's chances are this is what's going to show up if you type m or if you click on the toolbar now if you hold on the tool to hold down excuse me on the toolbar icon you can hover down to um with this little icon here and this is the slate material editor so they both are fundamentally the same thing they both do the same things um this is more of a sort of like node graph um visual gui like graphic user interface uh for the material editor um this this is super helpful if you're creating you know like uh complex complex materials that are blending different you know texture maps and stuff together that you'd like to see that visually represented in a graph it's really great for that sort of thing you know like say for instance if i wanted to choose a material like a bitmap or something and i could plug that right into any one of these channels and it's it's really great for visually representing what the material is doing what's being fed to what the other material i'll go ahead and just delete this the other material editor if i hold this down and go back to the regular standard one is fundamentally the same thing right this just has a series of shader swatches that you can see you can kind of preview what your material looks like and you can choose and you can click on any one of these particular material swatches to see what the parameters are that's being fed that material now if i double click on one of these swatches it opens it up and i can basically get a more larger view of what this is doing and if i want to see more or less of the shader swatches here i could type the x key and the x key will cycle through having different amounts of rows you can see like larger if you're you know if your scene has less materials maybe you want to see you know less swatches i usually just keep it at the standard 4x6 grid that it has here because i you know typically use a lot of materials in my scene and sometimes it's just easier to see them directly like that um yeah so anyway um so further down like in this these are all your material parameters um this is where you can rename your material like we could just do like a standard matte you know so like you can rename a material and um uh you could choose the basic shader parameters there's all kinds of different options here which will cover which each one of them does in a little bit here and you can choose all kinds of different classifications of the general material types so we'll uh we'll we'll jump into this a little bit more and next thing i want to look at real quick is just some general um render settings so if you type the p sorry the nine key if you type the nine key the um render setup dialog box is going to pop up here and of course you can always open it from the toolbar up here see if we pop that guy open you're going to get your um basic render settings so if you're brand new to 3d studio max basically these settings are universal to any kind of rendering engine which we'll talk briefly about the different types of rendering engines and why some are better than others and stuff like that um so these are fundamental to pretty much all the different types of rendering edges you're going to get you're going to get four macs so it has basically all the same settings so we'll cover very briefly what this stuff means so this is for you know if you're rendering a single frame just one one image or if you're rendering a time segment of the timeline let's say for an animation for instance you can specify the amount of frames that you want to render out or specific frames if you want to you can set an area to view uh or you know let's say for selected or something like that to in the particular through the particular camera that you're looking through or the viewport that you're looking through you can specify your output size which you could do like hdtv or something you know the standard size for um 1080p or you can do like a custom size which i you know for instagram typically do like let's say 1080 by 1080 for the standard portrait mode which is a one by one aspect ratio or let's say for instance like you want to do portrait mode for instagram that would be by 1080 i'm sorry 1080 by 1350 that would give you that elongated portrait view for instagram if you want to do something like that otherwise 1080 by 1080 square pixel ratio but in this case we'll just use http so we'll just use 1920 by 1080. um you have a bunch of different options here for rendering specific things in your scene and your render output is what is going where you're going to be saving your final rendered image so that's just a brief overview of some of this stuff we're going to be going into further depth of the all the different render settings in a separate video but for this particular video i'm just going to be briefly covering some render settings and focusing more specifically on the materials so real quick this is uh in your under your renderer we have you know maxcom by deepmax comes out of the box by default with the scanline renderer and uh i have a bunch of different rendering engines i have corona i have f storm and i have v-ray and arnold arnold has now come standard with the max installation i think which is a great rendering engine but all of them do slightly different things um let's say for instance corona and f-storm and v-ray so there's a difference between gpu based rendering engines which runs on your graphics card and cpu-based rendering engines which runs on your processor right so the the real difference between them is that gpu engines offer you know close to real-time rendering capabilities um but they are limited to the amount of vram on your particular graphics card right let's say if you have a really intense awesome graphics card top of the line typically it comes with about 10 11 12 gigabytes of vram which kind of limits the amount of geometry and materials that you can process in a particular image in a particular rendering right in a particular scene um so if you're using huge amounts of instance objects let's say for like like trees or you know something like that for to render a giant forest or crazy huge bitmaps for you know materials you might tap out that vram which is it's a little bit limiting sometimes and that's the difference between gpu and cpu based rendering which cpu tends to be slower it's not real time you know rendering but it can handle huge amounts of scene geometry which is which is sort of more of a brute force method um but i'm again like a lot of this my professional work um you know architectural visualization and stuff like all this was uh rendered with a storm and has you know a ton of scene geometry a lot of uh high poly count objects a lot of super high res textures and displacement and bump and all that kind of stuff which will cover all that stuff and you know this is just rendered on my single graphics card um back way back then now i have four graphics cards which definitely helps distribute the load of uh of heavier scenes but regardless um we'll jump back in here so for the duration of this tutorial i'm going to be using fstorm because it's just generally simpler it's kind of like what you see is what you get rendering engine which is pretty great so i just converted my scene to storm and you can see all the material swatches went black so what i'm gonna have to do is under the f-storm settings under tools i'm gonna convert scene to f-storm now most of the other rendering engines like corona and v-ray have the same tool to allow you to convert your scene it just might be you know in a different spot or something but you can do a quick google search if you can't find uh in your particular rendering engine where to find that convert button but most of them have it so okay i just converted my scene you can see all of these are now standard f-storm materials now which is awesome so real quick what we'll do is under kernel settings just a couple basic material or sorry rendering setup settings light samples i'm going to set to 12 max depth we're going to set this to like something like 24 a little bit higher and i'll show you why a little bit later on um and i'm going to keep my noise threshold maybe we'll put our noise threshold to zero zero one and uh array threshold we might increase this a little bit later on when we do some volumetric materials because we're going to need that else we're going to get some artifacts to to decrease this value as to little as possible when you do volumetric stuff but of course that comes at the cost of rendering time right so um yeah that's pretty much all we're going to use and under environment i'm going to toss in a texture map here we're going to use an hdri map so under f storm runner if you're using fstorm otherwise you can just use the gen the general bitmap here i'm going to use the storm bitmap and i'm going to drag that and drop it into one of the swatches my material editor as an instance click ok and scroll down and real quick i'm just going to set up this is just like a background texture um that i have here for an hdri map so that i got that hdr image here and it gives you a little preview of what it's going to look like and click ok and keep everything default under gamma i'm going to change this to 2.2 and under mapping i'm going to change this to spherical environment and that's just now we're pretty much done with our basic scene setup and we're ready to start really digging into some of these materials now so i'm going to go ahead and collapse all this stuff we don't really need it anymore maybe i'll set this to 2 or something to give us a little bit more light from that hdr have it affect your materials a little bit more precisely so i get to get rid of that and get rid of that for now and we'll uh we'll set some stuff up maybe in our next our background image here i'll set up another little background material and the way that you apply materials to an object is i'll kind of scroll around here so the way you apply it is you can either drag this swatch onto the object right and drop it or you can choose this little assign material to selection button and that'll apply that material that you made to the object right so that's how to apply materials basically now for the background i could choose a different color so be able to choose a little bit different color and you could tell that the color is changing because i changed the diffuse channel color to something a little bit darker and from here we're going to do is we're going to set up a couple quick lights again lighting is something i'm going to cover probably more in depth in a future video when we do more in-depth maybe we'll cover that during the render settings video and maybe this will just be or you know something uh you know maybe we'll cover that more specifically because there's there's a lot to lighting there's a lot to learn so i'm going to set up one light this is going to be my primary light and i'm going to set up another one as my secondary light so this is going to like offer a little bit more light bounce right and i'm just arbitrarily placing this stuff in here and you guys can of course be much more precise and go back and tweak all this stuff but just for now quick and dirty i'm gonna set my power to this secondary light to 4 and my primary light to something like 10. and that's going to be it for our render setup now if we go ahead and under our render settings under interactive render again depending on what your rendering engine is you probably have an interactive render or just you know you click on the big render button and this thing will fire up and boom you got your scene now we don't have any materials applied yet for the background but yeah that'll be our next step so we're going to fill each one of these spheres with a different type of material different material okay so i'll drag this over here for now and the first thing we're going to do is on this first swatch here we're just going to create like a basic glossy material so we'll just do like glossy right and we'll kind of see how that starts to look so now i'm going to go ahead and assign material to selection now that i have it selected and we'll go ahead and make this like a red or something right now if i just have the material as red you know it's just going to show up pretty pretty boring it's just like there's not much surface information it's very flat a couple things i can do though of course there's all these different parameters all these different settings in this particular material that i can adjust now these settings and the names of them are fundamentally universal to most rendering engines right the standard max scanline irae um you know arnold and even engines like v-ray and corona and even gpu engines like of course f-storm and octane um all have fundamentally these similar names these similar named parameters right so ior can control the sort of like overall reflectivity of an object and it's sort of like refraction as well it's it's kind of a funny parameter which will play around with this when we make some metal materials you have your reflection which of course black is no reflection and white is the most reflection the material can have so i just set this to white and you can see it's it's kind of reflective but it's not much like glossiness right so you can control the glossiness level with this parameter here so right now it's set to 0.1 which is super low right if i set it to 1 it's going to be very reflective right so you can already see i'm seeing my hdri map in the reflection of the sphere and along with my two lights that i set up now if i don't want to see the reflections of those lights just one quick tip i can lock my viewport so i can jump out to different viewports one quick tip here most lights for most rendering engines have a visibility checkbox so i can click uncheck that and you can see right away that the light is now invisible in my scene and i can click on the secondary light uncheck visibility boom it's done so now all i see in my reflection is just the hdri background which is cool okay so now let's uh play with this a little bit more um so you know if i want to set this to you know like this is like pretty cool it's a very glossy almost like a glossy plastic or painted metal or something like that but if i wanted to be more metallic like more like a mirror i could set my ior to something like two or five something like that now it's becoming more like a chrome right so i'm going to leave that at 1.5 for now and i'll jump back to ior a little bit later um all different types types of settings that uh um fstorm has again this is you know pretty pretty much fundamental to most rendering engines and then you have down here you have all of your maps right we're gonna we're gonna go over like what most of these mean again this is just a basic crash course guide so we're not going to get too deep into all of these just you know so this or else's tutorial would be 10 hours long so yeah so we'll um we'll create our next material here next one we're going to do is a basic glass material and in our diffuse channel typically we want to make glass materials diffuse channel is going to be black because there's no color right so i'm going to set my diffuse to be totally black right i'm going to reset my reflection to be pretty much all the way white almost and my glossiness to something like point eight something like that and you can see it's like a really reflective black material which that doesn't look like glass at all and now we play with your refraction settings right so under the color black is no refraction and as you guessed it white would be total refraction right so now we have a glass sphere and if i jump out of this viewport and jump back into my perspective viewport i can kind of scroll up on this guy and i can unlock my viewport so i can kind of get the pan around it a little bit and you can see it's it's behaving like a glass material like things are flat refracting through it which that's pretty cool so now that's a solid glass ball right and now let's say if i did something like really quickly if i modeled something inside of it like i don't know like a cube or something it's not a little cube all right i'm not going to get too fancy with it maybe we'll just do like eight by eight by eight and i'm gonna toss in just we'll just toss into like just some some other material maybe just like this just kind of like a white and i'll go ahead and align it to the center of that oops you know what i'll do is i'll uh under my pivot effect pivot only set it to object and if you guys watch the how to model anything we covered all that stuff how to model anything video in my channel and we'll click a line and we'll align the cube to the center of that sphere we'll kind of see what that looks like when we render it out so go ahead and refresh it so now you see there's like you know you can see a cube in there but it's acting really strangely that's because it's within a solid cube of glass right so it's a little bit weird and we can play with the refraction a little bit but ultimately if you wanted to have the glass be like a shell like i have a thickness to it it's going to look different so we'll do is take a glass material and we'll toss this on this sphere right and we'll go ahead and do a shell modifier and we'll leave it me about yeah something like that will be fine for now and i'll grab my cue i'll copy it over and i'm going to align it to the sphere and we'll see what that looks like sorry for refresh it now you can see that the glass has it's almost like a film kind of like a bubble um and if i scroll up into that you know you can tell that there's a thickness to the glass which is pretty cool and of course you could play with these settings all you want and get the glass to be super reflective or super transparent if you want it kind of just depends it's kind of up to you you can set the ior to 2 or something you can kind of see how the reflection around the glass is kind of like warping around it which is kind of you know interesting usually glass i think has a standard ior rating of like 1.65 or something like that to kind of ground in the real world so yeah there you go i mean that's that's how you would do architectural glass like something like a window you would have to give it a thickness or if you want to render soap bubbles or something you'd have to give them a slight thickness or else objects inside of them or objects are refracting through them will look a little strange if they're completely solid glass okay so the next quick material that we're going to look at doing is going to be chrome so we'll go ahead and create our chrome material and i say chrome i mean more of like a metallic material you know it could be chrome it could be gold it could be bronze or brass or something like that but in this case let's go ahead and create a chrome material and we'll uh apply that to our object we have it selected here and chrome will do we could do black for the diffuse color um reflection i'm sorry yeah reflection is going to be close to white glossiness we can do you know 0.85 or something like that again you can adjust all that stuff depending on what you want the thing to look like right and um ior is going to be something like 10. we'll start with 10. now if i double click on my chrome sphere obviously it's going to look like that right it's looking pretty chromy so now if i go ahead and update that cool so now you can tell it's starting to reflect all the spheres around it's starting to get my hdri map and it's starting to get really reflective now i can set my glossiness to be one right that'll give me like a perfectly that'll give me a perfectly reflective sphere right and if that's something that you want awesome typically materials aren't perfectly reflective even mirrors are a slightly you know non-reflective to a certain extent right so if you're gonna do a perfect mirror um what i would suggest is putting on like a reflection texture map or even like a texture map in the glossy channel to maybe add a little bit of dirt or maybe some fingerprints and stuff and like stuff like that is like materials that you can find or you can purchase you know you can even look at websites like i have this one up textures.com there's all kinds of different stuff i mean there's tons of different materials on here and even materials for you know like overlays like stuff like water droplets and stuff like you know dirt and stuff that you know normally that would be on like a reflective object you know fingerprints and stuff like that so just keep that in mind that is uh that's that's something that uh to enhance the realism of your particular scene just all things that you can do to your material to to uh to to bring out just even more realism okay so the next material that we're going to cover which you know real quick i could i could show you if we if we you know drag and drop this material to a different slot it's going to copy it but it's going to copy it as a pure copy right so i can name this one gold something and i can bring down my glossiness a little bit let's do 0.85 or something and you know i'll just go ahead and maybe i'll copy this one again i'll just just to show you what it's going to look like and i'll apply the gold material there i'm just going to go ahead and refresh this and you know similar thing like if you want to create a gold you can just basically find a color in your reflection color slot and you can kind of play with this and you can kind of get like that uh sort of like the saturated kind of like gold look to it it almost looks more like a brass or bronze at this point but you know you can kind of play with that um even if you want to change the color up and have like a you know chrome um you know like a very reflective colored sphere or something you know it could do your colored object you know so all different stuff that you could play with which is really cool awesome so next material up we're going to go slightly further down the rabbit hole now so we're going to do something with emissive materials so we'll just name this one like light bulb or something i don't know so we're going to play around some emissive materials so i'm going to select this sphere i'm going to apply this material to that sphere and i'm going to leave all the settings default for now and under a mission i'm going to turn mission on and change my color to something like maybe a blue or something aquamarine maybe we'll get a little bit sci-fi here um and i'm going to crank up my power just to one for now and kind of see what that looks like you could tell you could tell what's happening here um it's starting to emit light now if i crank that up to like 10 now it's really going to start emitting emitting light and you can tell what's happening you know it's emitting light on my scene i can even choose direct illumination which is going to really pump even more light it's going to treat that object as more of a light than a you know an object so it's going to be calculating light bounces from that object which is pretty cool so um you know i can crank that way up let's say like 500 and we'll see what that does so like it starts to like now you can tell like the bloom starts happening on my camera lens which is pretty cool so we'll drop this down to something like 20. again all these parameters are of course like highly editable and you can kind of tweak them to your heart's desire to make all kinds of different complex materials yeah so the next material that we're going to make is going to be kind of like um it's going to be a volumetric material what i mean by that is like it's material that you would apply to things like fog or smoke things that allow light to pass through them but kind of give this like sort of like a part of particular like particle look to them so we'll name this one smoke and i'll grab that next sphere here and i'll go ahead and slap this material on there and um in my so we'll go ahead and look at this to the camera so we get a broad view of everything we got so far and in my smoke material what i'm going to do is set the diffuse channel to black because we don't want any but diffuse color and then set the ior to 1 because that's the lowest possible ior you can have and now we have a pure black material so if you want to make a black hole set the ir water one you're diffused to black and you're good to go and the roof reflection i'm going to keep black and refraction i'm going to set that to pure white all the way white right now that gives me a completely transparent material right now i can't i can't even see it in my viewport or the in the renderer or anything but now i'm going to control the material with this volume parameter these volume parameters down here so absorption is completely white that's why we can't see it so if i set it to you know gray you know it starts to pop up right now i can set that to maybe a little bit darker something like black and more scattering we can set that to a little bit lighter and that affects the surface of it so like the surface like is the depth of uh as the light bounces through the depth of material it kind of gives this soft cotton ball look effect which you can tweak to make even more look like fog and the way we do that is with the distance parameter so if i set that to something like 50 it's going to become even more less dense if that makes sense um you know and i can kind of tweak these parameters to get it to where like the the more deep the camera is looking through the object like the thicker the object right um the more dense part of the object is going to be darker right so in this case the sphere the densest part of the object is of course the center of the sphere right so like it's looking more black in the center and it kind of fades out has this fall off effect which is pretty cool so we kind of kind of like look around this thing in the perspective viewport and kind of see what's what that thing's looking like so you can tell that it allows you to see through the object so you can see this other sphere through the object which is pretty cool it's a very cool effect so this is like a sort of a side note but if you're using particle systems like let's say for instance if you're using phoenix fd or realflow or something a lot of those don't have a lot of those types of plugins are difficult to render on a gpu based rendering engine right the reason for that is they account for huge amounts of particles right you have to render each one of those particles and it's a giant amount of information to process on a single gpu right but the way to fake it is by setting those particular particle systems to have a mesh right so phoenix fd you're able to set the the render setting in the render settings of phoenix fd when you're rendering like smoke for instance you can set it to render mesh and then you can apply a material like this to that mesh and it'll look just like smoke which is a handy little little uh tip for you so anyway yeah that's that's how you do uh you know very simple volumetric materials so you can render things like clouds and smoke and fog and stuff like that okay so next couple the last two materials we're going to be looking at using texture maps right and we're going to be looking at using the uv uvw map modifier and a couple other modifiers to to allow you to get some pretty cool effects using texture maps right so in this next material we're going to call this one wood i'll just do a simple wood material right if i scroll down under the diffuse channel i'm going to click this little checks box so we want to be able to use the map and i'm going to click on where it says node map i'm going to go have storm bitmap you can use a standard bitmap doesn't matter and under the file where it says file go ahead and open this guy up and i got a wood material set up already so i click on wood okay and uh what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna grab this sphere here and i'm gonna slap my wood i'm gonna slap my wood material on the sphere right so all right so uh kind of go in the perspective viewport and look and see how that's looking now we can visualize what the wood material looks like in the scene by clicking this little show shaded material and viewport button so click on that guy and you know this you can see what it's looking like in the scene i can even turn off my edge faces we don't need that so awesome now this is a very boring wood indeed very boring right you want to spice up that wood a little bit right typically wood has reflection right so if it's a polished wood if it has a glossy coat on the wood you know like if you brand new chair or something that you know has might have a glossiness to it right so we can add a little bit of reflectivity to it maybe something like that kind of just play around with this and a little bit of glossiness something like point six maybe yeah there you go now that is a like a very highly polished perfect wood surface right now typically in the real world wood would have a grain to it right so we need to use a bump map to give a little bit of a bump texture a little bit of a surface uh information to to the to the wood material right and the way we do that is we have to create a bump map right and stick it in this bump um map slot here right now the way bump maps work is that um typically what you you can do like a very easy way to do this what we'll do is i'll go ahead and pop open photoshop and i will take my wood material that we just referenced and i'll stick that in photoshop and open it up and this is assuming that you have photoshop it's very important to as a 3d artist to always have photoshop and be able to use it for texture maps whenever you need to um if you're using things like substance painter or um you know quicksilver mixer or whatever um uh those sorts of programs you know are very you know robust and you can do all kinds of different material painting and stuff like that but for this tutorial this is very basic i'll show you how to create a quick bump map right so a bump map the channel reads black and white right and the gradient between right black white and gray right so black is the depth is like the lower parts of the bump right so you can imagine the surface variation of wood in the grain the deep parts of the grain is going to be black right and the high parts the peaks of the grain are going to be white right and then all in between is going to be gray and gradients of gray so i have my material set up here my texture map is loaded into photoshop and i'll go ahead and really quickly i'll toss on a black and white filter and we got a black and white all right cool and then i'll toss in a levels filter this is just super quick and dirty i'm going to set my blacks to pretty far black right set my whites to pretty pretty white right and i want to get at least a little bit of like i don't want completely black completely white but i want to get a little bit of variation in there uh just to get some more of those grays flowing in between um and depending on the resolution of your texture map that's really going to pop out so i'll go ahead and do a ctrl shift s and i'll save this as a jpeg and i'll just rename this bump cool and bump maps are different than displacement maps which is what we're going to be looking at next but we'll continue with our wood example here so in our bump channel here i'm going to go ahead and toss in another bitmap and under file i'm going to go ahead and choose the bump map we just made okay so now if i continuing rendering this it's going to look terrible which is because it's too it's too high up so we'll set this to something like 0.2 which is something really low there we go so now we start to see that surface information right which is awesome and it still looks very um it's kind of fake i mean this is like a for a very rustic wood um maybe we would do something like that to maybe drop our glossiness down and so like it it becomes more rustic um but if we want to keep our glossiness there i'm just going to turn this down a little bit more maybe with something 0.05 there we go now we're starting to get in the realm of like photorealism right maybe even 0.1 0.05 something like that there you go so now we're starting to get that that surface information that's really important for even close-up shots so again depending on the texture the resolution of your texture map the higher resolution the more information you're going to get and the closer you can get to that particular object but for distances that are about this far away something like that i mean for a wood floor or something i'd be perfectly happy with that you know in fact i've used this texture map before in like commercial like high resolution awesome renderings but i just use it for like a fixture like a chair leg or like you know maybe even a floor plank or something you know so you get that surface information and it just looks so much better when you have a little bit more detail to it right all right cool and so the last and final material we're going to be looking at is a grass material which we're going to be using we're going to be creating a displacement map right so i'm going to name this one grass and leave all this stuff the standard for now and under my diffuse channel i'm going to click on bitmap and i'm going to create grab my grass material right and i'm going to set that visible and i'm going to slap it on my sphere there cool now obviously it's looking pretty awful right now a couple things i can do is i can go back out to my full parameter list here and then i can if i want to say adjust the color of that right i can under the i could basically parent um a color correction uh modifier onto this bitmap right so i'll do uh i've storm color corrector color correction and i'll go keep old map as sub map and sometimes it does that so you have to go back and turn that on and what i can do here is i can adjust like the overall like you know saturation i can like offset it so it's lighter i can make it even more saturated if i want to make it a darker grass or something increase the saturation i can increase that i can adjust the hue of it if i want to make a slightly different color look a little bit more cartoony or something you know all of that is like just parameters you can tweak and you don't have to necessarily photoshop stuff you know so let's say you know i want to bring this back down to like where it was it's kind of like where it was 0.5 you know that's just i'm showing you guys stuff that you can do you know um so with this one we'll like leave this stuff the same we'll kind of maybe increase our refra uh reflection a little bit there um but what we'll do now is we could do a couple different things we could create a bump map for the grass right and this would be something for like distant grass objects that are in your scene this is not something you would want to do for close-up grass close-up grass i would scatter like actual geometry of grass onto you know the grass surface um but then further distance you can use a texture map and a displacement map right just like a little bit wave cheating that allows the rendering to be cheaper and take less time to produce right so you can tell that even if i increase the bump map let's say on my wood here we'll go back to our wood example if i increase the bump map to something like 20 like make it super bumpy right i mean you can't really tell but if we zoom way into it let's see something like 5 you can tell that the you can still see the faceting of the edges of the material the bump only affects the surface of the shader and it doesn't affect the it doesn't represent geometry right but that's the difference that's what displacement does all right so we'll cover we'll cover displacement now so let's set that back down what was that 0.05 something like that anyway so we'll kind of zoom back out here and what we'll do now is we're going to go ahead and create a displacement map which is different than a bump map and for this example we're not going to be using photoshop even though we can i think the newer photoshop cc has the ability to create normal and displacement maps but i always i like to use this software called crazybump and maybe i'll leave a link in the description below i think it's a still i think it's still a free software i don't remember um regardless of i think let me just so crazy bump is awesome now it's very uh simple right it's literally just for creating normal and displacement maps and stuff like that i mean it's really super robust and really cool it's super easy to use right crazy bump there's a free version of it i think there's a free like trial version and i think a regular license cost a hundred bucks which is what i paid for it a number of years ago and i still use it today because it's so fast it's super easy and it's like let's just use what you get and i love that so what we'll do is once you first open crazy bump you can click open you can open photograph from file and we'll go ahead and open our grass now if you're purchasing a material from textures.com let's say for instance you know type grass a lot of these textures have some of these textures have height maps right which is effectively a displacement map and they have normal maps and stuff like that but in the case that you just google an image and you don't have that information you don't have a displacement or normal map you got to make one if you want that and you want that you know surface information right so i'll go ahead and select this shape right and what it does is it gives you a preview of what the normal map is going to look like in this case the displacement what what that's going to look like on the actual object which is pretty awesome and i can increase or decrease the intensity it'll decrease the intensity a little bit i can increase like the uh very fine detail maybe we'll boost that up a little bit maybe like lower the large detail so we don't want too much like intense surface variation we just want like actually you know for this example kind of just blast that out a little bit so i'll show you what that looks like awesome so that looks cool now what i'll do is i will with the displacement channel selected here i'm going to go ahead and save i'm going to save displacement to file and i'll just do grass grass displace it just names it for you as a jpeg save awesome now close down crazy bump because we don't need anymore that's how fast it is it's awesome um okay so now on our sphere what i'll do is um i'm going to toss on a uh f storm displacement modifier right now if i want to use displacement i got to use the f storm displacement modifier and i think v-ray has a similar modifier actually i think you can use normal maps in v-ray and corona but you can't you can't necessarily use normal maps in the material itself something to do with the gpu engine so i'm not totally sure why but it has to be this modifier so um we'll just toss on a storm bitmap and we'll just put it here so we'll go ahead and drag that and drop it onto one of our swatches as an instance so if we change any of these parameters here it's going to automatically change anywhere else you have it applied and i'm going ahead and under file i'm going to select our grass displacement that we just created click open and then that applied it to the object right so now that's all we need to do and under the power is where we can adjust that we'll go ahead and refresh this boom now you can see what the difference was is that the edges of the material are going to have that geometric displacement right it's going to have that surface deviation that variation i can crank this up a little bit if i want to i'll make five and go ahead and refresh it it's going to be like wow that's some serious intense grass ball almost looks like moss or something but you could tell i mean like this is like super mega fast to render this because there's no actual geometry it's just reading that surface information from the texture map you know which is awesome so stuff like this is awesome for rendering you know moss or grass or whatever at a distance and if you're going to do something closer up you know i would always tend to use i always tend to use actual geometry and scatter it for super close-up shots of stuff like that but regardless now you know how to use displacement maps and the last thing that we're going to look at is using the uvw map modifier so for this case um you know like when we will use our wood example because it's a little bit simpler we'll just go ahead and create a cube here or something and um maybe it'll just like make this like 25 by 25 to 25. cool and i'm going to toss on our wood material right now what if i want to control the grain of the of the wood and how do i adjust the material well you know you can adjust it globally and here you can adjust the tiling if you want to you know you can adjust the rotation and stuff like that that's kind of like a dumb way of doing it because it's going to change it globally on every single material that you have this apply to and i just want to change this cube i don't want to change the sphere right so what i'll do is under modifier stack for this particular object i'm going to drop this down and scroll down i'm going to choose uvw map all right now you can already tell what it did it created a planar map so the plane is facing in the xy plane in the xy direction so if i refresh my scene so we can see our cube here it's basically just like wrapping that texture map on the sides of the cube and we don't really want that right so i can set this to be a box right and let me just go ahead and shrink this up so you guys can see what it's doing and now that i set that as a box i can go ahead and refresh this awesome so now what i can do is i can you know i can play with all these different settings there's spherical there's shrink wrap there's face if i want the exact same size map on every single face it's going to apply that map to the bounds of the face of each face of the geometry right but let's say for instance if i want to adjust the texture itself uh right now it's um kind of boring so what i can do is the way i did that is i you can drop down this little drop down here and click on gizmo or you can just like if you're you know if you click away from it if it's highlighted blue you know click on something else or whatever blah blah i can if it's blue i can click on it again and it'll just like have this blue box around it and that way i can adjust the texture map right so now i'm not moving the object i'm moving the uvw map modifier gizmo okay so i can adjust the scale of this let's say if i want i'll i want the faces facing the same orientation turn on my angle snaps here you know something like that now the grain i want this green to face downward or something i can adjust the map to do whatever i want right which is pretty cool and i can adjust this kind of get it like almost seamless you know something like that cool so that's looking like a pretty cool little cube there and i can always like increase the scale of it or something so now that this tutorial is almost an hour long um that's pretty much the extent of what we're going to be able to cover during this video um i there's so much more there's so much more to materials right you can do so much with all the different parameters of these different materials and it's just this is just a few that we came up with right just this like this is stuff that i use all the time you know just a quick overview we created a glo like a simple glossy plastic sort of material we created a solid glass a um a glass that has a thickness to it right and show the the different uh look that you get from having a glass that has a shelled thickness to it versus a solid thick you know solid mass and we created a chrome and you know different variations of metallic materials right an emissive material a volumetric material a wood material that has a bump map for like you know surface variation for the grain and a grass material that has displacement map for the surface variation right sort of the surface information um so these these are like fun this is like the fundamental set of materials that i use all the time and you know just by like tweaking materials and the parameters you can literally make any kind of material you can think of just by you know just let me buy like these fundamental um set of parameters that we looked at today and um you know of course you can go further down the rabbit hole and create things like car paint which has like you know you know reflective um you know the information in the paint and stuff like that it's it's you know it can get infinitely more complex from here right um and things that i'd like to cover in future videos are things like the uvw unwrap modifier um and that's for things like um you know creating um unwrapping things for like you know to use in games and stuff like that so you can like explode like this particular sphere into like individual unwrapped objects then you can paint in photoshop or bring into substance paint or whatever you know so there's like a million really cool things you can do with materials and and with that um you know i i hope you guys like the tutorial and please let me know if you have any questions feel free to reach out in the comments section below and let me know what you thought of the video if you found this to be helpful um you know if you were confused on any particular you know materials or settings or anything that we looked at during the duration of the video please feel free to let me know and if you liked the video please smash the like button and subscribe for more um next up i think we're going to be focusing more specifically on lighting and and render settings even in even further in depth um we lightly touched on that today but um definitely something that i would like to uh to do a little course on next so again yeah thank you so much for watching and uh and we'll see you soon thanks bye

Channel: Simulation Lab

Views: 47,417

Keywords: 3ds max, tutorial, crash course, materials, rendering, 3d modeling, bump, displacement, fstorm, 3d art, animation

Id: YHKN6SEnRXw

Length: 58min 5sec (3485 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020