This is my first tutorial on anything so bear with me; I
will try to be as complete as possible. I decided to write this tutorial for
two reasons; firstly to benefit those in the online CG community who have
helped me get started with their wonderful tutorials and advice as well as
those just starting to find their way in CG, and secondly because I could not
find any similar tutorials that yielded what I would consider satisfactory results.
As we all know 3Ds Max does not come with a decent precious
or semi-precious metal material. Originally I tried making my own gold by
modifying the dark gold material that comes with 3Ds Max, but as you may
imagine that did not turn out well. So going online I found many tutorials
dealing with gold, a few that included copper, and one or two that included
brass. They were all needlessly complex, took forever to put together,
delivered results that were less than spectacular, took too long to render, or
had some combination of the afore-mentioned problems. So having a little more
experience in 3Ds Max and being fed up with trying to follow tutorials that
were not giving the results I liked; I went back to my own drawing board.
The metals will all be shown initially in a polished state
in order to display the Material without any effects from the different
surfaces I will show you at the end of the tutorial. Also despite my complaint
about long render times, be aware that if you follow my instructions in setting
up the test scene for the Materials it will take a minute or two to render.
This is because I jacked up the triangle count on the teapot (160,000) in order
to give it a very smooth surface so that the Materials could be shown without
any deformation due to blocky geometry. One final note before I get into it, I
will assume that all the menus and panels are in their default placements, if
you are advanced enough to have re-arranged the layout I will assume you are
advanced enough to find where you put the different parts of the interface. I
will not get too into the physics of light reflection/refraction because lets
face it, if thats what you wanted you would have bought a book on color
theory.
The tutorial will be split up into several parts:
1) Immediately
following on this page is a very basic scene to display our work and the
Materials we will create
2) Gold
and Copper Materials
3) Brass
and Bronze Materials
4) Platinum
and Silver Materials
5) Four
basic finishes that are appropriate for use with each of the metals and some
considerations for aging the metals
Basic Scene
If you have not already, go ahead and start up 3Ds Max. Now
click in the Perspective viewport and then click the Maximize Viewport Toggle
to maximize it. In the Create Panel make sure Standard Primitives are selected
in the drop down box. Next click the Plane primitive and click and drag in the
viewport to create a plane. Do not worry about where to make it or how big, we
will set that now. With the Plane still selected click the Select & Move button
on the top toolbar then press F12 to bring up the Move Transform Type-In
dialog. In the Absolute:World group enter 0 for X, Y, and Z then close the
dialog by clicking the large X to the right of the title bar. Next with the
plane still selected click the Modify panel and where it says Length enter
1000, do the same for the Width box.
Now click the create panel again to leave the Modify panel
and press M on your keyboard to bring up the Material Editor. Click on the
first sphere and where it says 01-Default select the text and type in Floor.
Leave Blinn as the shader and in the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout in the
Specualr Highlights section enter 67 for Specular Level and 42 for
Glossiness. Now scroll down to the maps rollout and click where it says
Maps to expand it if it is not already expanded. Click on the long grey
button that says None next to Diffuse Color. The Material/Map Browser
Window will open double click Checker in the list to select the checker map. The
Material/Map Browser Window will close and you will be looking at the settings
for the Checker Map. In the Coordinates rollout set the Tiling for both U and
V to 100. Set the angle for W to 45. Leave everything else here as it is
and press the Go To Parent Button. Now click the long grey button that says
None next to Reflection. Once again the Material/Map Browser Window will
open, this time double click Falloff Map to select it and close the
Material/Map Browser Window. Click the long grey None button next to the
second color and in the list and double click Raytrace. Leave the defaults
alone and click the Go To Parent Button to go back to the Falloff map
options and change the Falloff Type to Fresnel.
Now scroll down to the Mix Curve rollout. Right click both
terminators on the line drawn on the graph and select Bezier-Corner. Now you
will notice a short line and a black terminatior extending from each terminator
on the line. Left click the new terminator coming off the right side of the
line and drag it to the top left corner of the graph. Next Left click the new
terminator coming off the left side of the line and drag it all the way to the
left of the graph and about two thirds of the way up. It should look like the
image below.
One last thing and we
are done with the scene.
In the Create Panel click Teapot and click and drag in
the viewport to create a Teapot in the middle of the scene any size you want. Now
click the Select and Move button again and press F12 to bring up the Move
Transform Type-In dialog again and once again enter 0 for X, Y, and Z. Now go
to the Modify Panel again and set Segments to 50. We are done with the
basic scene; the Teapot will be the object we apply our metal Materials to.
.
