Max - Slate Material Editor

hello in this video I'll show you how you can use 3ds Max's slate material editor to access that either click right here or simply press M and I open up this window right here in or Chakra material you have two options first you can go here in the materials and here we have standard please the regular materials that come to Deus Max by default if you have for example mental rail or v-ray enabled as your renderer you will have more specialized materials available here specific to those renderers saga double-click your standard it appears right here in the center I can select this and press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it I can also right click materials and select standard from right here and here it is to navigate in this little viewport here you can use the middle mouse button and then to the move your mouse to move around just like you would here in the viewport to zoom in and out you can scroll your middle mouse button you can also use these controls here on the bottom so what I'm gonna do is select this hold shift and then move to create some clones some copies now all of these have a different name you can see I start with material 52 but this one is called material 53 and this one is material 54 so they're not instanced when you're working with materials unlike geometry there is no real reason to instance actual materials but what you can instance is the actual maps that go into it and I'll cover that a little bit later on but let's say that I press Z here nothing really happens if I go under view you can see I have some shortcuts here zoom tool on Z zoom region tool ctrl W zoom extents alt ctrl Z and zoom extents like that is Z so if I press Z I should be able to zoom in on all of them but right now pressing Z and nothing is really happening now when I'm working here in the viewport let's say I create two little spheres here now if I press Z it will zoom in on them if I select one and press Z you zoom in on that one so the zoom extents works here if I go back to time of your editor if I press Z doesn't work here if I actually activate the keyboard shortcut or rectangle and then I press Z you can see it actually works now so this button here you can disrupt a lot of the shortcuts in the viewport but when it's used for is we have a specific window open and you want to use the shortcuts available here then you activate it and then the shortcuts will work here however when you want to go back to modeling and working with the viewport you want to make sure that it's off otherwise a lot of your shortcuts will not work and now that it's on all of these shortcuts will work but the two ones that I use mostly RZ and ctrl W which is the zoom region tool so if I press ctrl W and let's say that I click and drag right here that now becomes active so it's kind of a fast way of kind of limiting what you're looking at here so if I select this and hold shift you can say have a lot of materials here and this viewport can get pretty busy so I'll press ctrl W and let's say I will work with these three right here I'll just make a rectangle around here and it zooms in on those three and then it can also let's say zoom in on these two and here we are or I can simply select them and press Z and this is pretty much what these buttons down here do although using the shortcuts a lot faster and moving your mouse down here and pressing all these buttons but it's pretty much the same actions here pan zoom zoom region zoom extents zoom extents selected and pan to selected so now I'll simply press Z and I will delete all of these materials and these two as well and I'll press C again so here is a standard material you can minimize this by clicking right here and now it's minimized maximized by clicking the plus so here we have these little circles this allows us to plug various maps into here so let's say I want to plug something into the diffuse color slot here I can right click Maps standard and I'll choose checker now I actually have it to be activated I'll simply click here drag and then plug it into the fuse color and now you can see this changes here I didn't double click on this to see a big review my material and double click it again to minimize it another way that I can add maps is by going under maps standard and now I can choose let's say I will choose smoke and I'll double-click here and a smoke appears right here and I can click and hold and plug it into let's say Spiker level right here and I can plug the same map into multiple slots here so I can click and hold and put this into opacity for example now to actually work with the parameter editor here I need to double click one of these so if I double click on this all the settings with material appear right here and I can now work with this if I double click on this I can modify the check repair a maternal click on smoke and now I have a smoke available so if you simply click on a box here you will see a white outline around it that means it's selected but it does not mean that you can edit its parameters right here you have to double click to get the dotted lines to appear around it this can be a little bit confusing at first because you may click on this right here and start adding some things but you're actually still modifying this material right here because this one is one of the dotted lines here we have a navigator which allows us to see all the materials and maps to make up our scene the blue are the materials and the green are the maps and here the navigator we can see which object has a white outline and which one has a dotted outline let's say when I apply this material to an actual object in this scene I'll just delete these Spears and I'll create a box here with the box selected I will select a material right now this material has a dotted line but it's not a white line in order to get a white line I have to click on it so now I have two lines both a dotted line showing that I can edit parameters right here as well as a solid white line letting us know this is the selected material so what is selected I can have my object selected as well and I can click on this one right here assignments Yodas lection and now it's been assigned now let's say I wanna see what these various maps look like on my object i will press control X here to go into expert view which gets rid of these details on the left and on the right and we have a lot more room here so let's say I wanna see what the checker looks like on this box I will select it and click right here under show shaded material in viewport and you can see with the checker looks like on this box and you see we have this little red indicating this is what's visible in the viewport if we only hit the smoke I'll click on this and once you click on the button and now we see the smoke here so double click here and I can for example change the size to 25 and swap the colors here and you can see the changes on the box if I click on the material and click on this button we see the red right here and what it's now trying to do is show us what the end result is with all these maps applied if you're a very complex material with a lot of maps plugged in it may take a little bit of time to actually show up here and if you enable this for all of your objects in the scene here a complex scene it may greatly decrease the performance the framerate in your scene so it's best to keep it off now this box right now is a gray color that's because I'm a double click here the color here the diffuse is gray however if I actually render the box here I will press shift F to see my actual rendering dimensions and zoom in and then I will press shift Q to render you can see the actual box renders with the maps that are plugged in so even if I change this diffuse color to red and if I render it you can see it's not red so even though this object is red and we are red under the few slot it doesn't matter because it's being overridden by the checker map right here so the actual color of the object the geometry may be a little bit misleading this isn't what we actually see when we render so you may want to have only the diffuse map visible in the viewport just to have things make a little bit of sense now if I click and drag this material you can see it's moving independently of its children the material is the parent and these maps are the children however if I click on this option right here move children the children will also move with the material you can move them all together now if I select this material and hold ship and move you can see another clone is being made of the material but the same maps are still plugged in so right now this map checker is instanced to both the diffuse color of this material 74 and this material 52 however let's say I select this and delete it if I select both the parent and the child the material in the maps and then hold shift and move you can see that all of them are independent of this right here now as you work the materials the maps will simply become a little bit complicated and they will kind of get this arranged what you can do is click here to lay out all horizontal I notice they're all being laid out horizontally or I can click and hold this and switch to vertical and now they're all laid out vertically so this is a quick way to organize all your materials and maps this button right here hide unused note slots allows us to hide all the slots that are unused for all these three materials we only have the diffuse specular and no pastry being used if I select these three materials and click on this button you can see all the unused maps are no longer visible so only the few specular and Oh pasty are visible however if I double click on this material right now selected right here I can still go into maps and see they're all available right here so right now these three are being used but if I uncheck these boxes here you're no longer being used but we're still plugged in here the plugs let us know that they are available but we can actually determine which ones are used by the checkmarks here and even though these slots are hidden right here if I wanted to for example insert something into the bump slot I can just click here and choose for example speckle and now speckle appears right here with no problems and now it also becomes visible under bump you can also go here to set the actual strengths of all the maps so if I want the bump to be stronger I can bump it up to sixty seven thirty to sixty sometimes I want to be very light so I consider for example five you will not always want these to be set to 100 sometimes mean what the spirit level just be at fifty percent hide unused note slots also applies to the maps themselves so if I select these maps and activate it you can see all the unused slots are being removed so I will delete both these materials up here so one map that's very important is the composite map and this map essentially allows you to layer up multiple details so I will unplug these now we just slept with this right here so I will for example plug this into layer one and double click on this so here on the Left we have the actual texture and on the right we have a mask we have multiple options and what we can do with this texture we can click on these little eyes here to disable it to make it invisible so I will plug this into the material you notice that even though this is hidden if I click and drag this over here it returns so I can choose the fuse color now only the fuse color remains so using this right here is a nice way to keep things uncluttered and clean so in our composite map here we have the base layer as just checkers with no modifications done to it I can click on this button to duplicate this layer and click on this button to delete it if I click on this one on the center I can actually name the layer so I can call this something like base metal if I was working with a metal texture here aside I'm duplicating I can simply click right here to add a new layer with no texture and no mask I can change what blending mode this texture uses by simply clicking here I have all the usual ones you'd expect some of useful ones are multiply overlay soft light but a lot more coming handy in various situations I can change the opacity by changing number right here so we enter in a number or can simply click and drag to change a number now on both the left and the right we have these eyes and we have this right here if we click on this we apply a color correction to this material so if I move this over here we can see that now I have a checker map going through color correction going into the composite going into the material so I have four nodes here and the collaboration allows is to change various aspect of the texture we can make a monochrome we can invert it custom I can also modify the hue the saturation the brightness the contrast the hue tent strength here we also have advanced here which gives us more advanced controls on the lightness increasing the contrast will make the bright parts brighter and the dark parts darker decreasing it will make it more gray and faded out looking so you can see here as I move the contrast you're left the checkered starts looking more and more faded until eventually it becomes gray with no absolute no contrast and with the brightness if I move to the left you can see that the white starts becoming darker and darker and let's move it to the right the black starts getting lighter and lighter so I'll goes from pure white to pure black here the left so going back to composite that's what color correction does you can simply click here and it will automatically apply color correction map right here you can also play clock reduction to your mask here on the right you can hide this layer you can also hide the mask layer you can also get even more advanced and have a composite layer instead of a composite layer so let's say that we're whatever text you have right here let's say I plug in this here the smoke map it's now our layer to smoke and I can click here and rename this to smoke just have an accurate name here and I can click here and select composite and now I have a composite layer inside of a composite layer and now I can for example drag this into here and I'll turn off the move children so I can move this independently we can see how you can make a very complex chain of various Maps materials and hook them up together in creative ways and this can also help you to work very efficiently because now you can have an instanced map effect both this and this and we can see exactly how this works now in order to make this easier to see I will actually remove the checker from the base layer one and now you'll notice that there is no checker here just says none and here I'll insert something else I'm just insert for example wood and for this composite what abase done is a double click here and then click here to add this mask and one will actually do is drag this over here make that a copy and delete the bottom layer so what we've got right now is if we go back to what's happening here is we have wood we have smoke on top and I'll make this smoke more this thing I'll just make it green whenever you're testing out various maps is a good idea to get in very distinct colors so you can see exactly what's going on so right now the wood is brown here and the smoke is green and the smoker won't be visible in this checker map using also this gradient ramp so let's see what the actual result will look like here you can see that the wood is perfectly visible here in the top left on the bottom right but now the mask for the smoke for the green smoke is first using the checker map and then also using the gradient map so you can see how the checker map is limiting it to the bottom left and the top right and the gradient map is working together with a checker map to limit it too strongly on the bottom and as it goes up it's getting weaker and weaker so this is how you can use multiple maps in combination along with the composite map to really have control over your colors your textures and the various maps that you use this will make more sense once I start using some v-ray procedural texturing thank you for watching and take care

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 67,437

Keywords: free, online, education, learn, class, lesson, tutorial, walkthrough, arrimus, help, tip, how to, slate, 3d, 3ds, max, texture, map, color, material, editor, polygon, mesh, design, node, computer, graphics, visual

Id: Ofo2d7ofTfI

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2016