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Leverage the Slate Material Editor to give the surfaces of your 3ds Max models a different appearance by adding materials and textures.
Type:
Tutorial
Length:
8 min.
Tutorial resources
These downloadable resources will be used to complete this tutorial:
Transcript
00:04
Now,
00:04
let's take a look at how we can start
00:05
to add different materials and textures to our geometry.
00:08
Inside of three Ds Max,
00:10
we have this sort of music room set up and we
00:12
don't really have any textures or materials on things right now.
00:15
So everything is the same gray material.
00:18
And what we want to do is start to define areas that are,
00:21
let's say wood or plastic or a different color of red or blue.
00:25
And so to do that, we will add materials
00:27
to add materials.
00:28
We want to go to our material editor and there are
00:30
two different kinds of editors inside of three Ds Max.
00:33
There is a compact editor, but we're gonna use the slate material editor,
00:37
which is a little bit more complex.
00:38
So to open the material editor, there are a couple of ways we can do that,
00:42
we can come up to rendering,
00:44
come down to material editor.
00:46
There's also a material browser and material explorer,
00:49
but let's go into the material editor
00:50
and you can see there are the two types that I mentioned, compact and slate.
00:54
Let's go ahead and open the slate material editor.
00:57
And so this is gonna have some menus on the top a row of icons right below that.
01:01
And then on the left are going to be all of the different sort of nodes that we can add.
01:06
Some of these are materials.
01:07
Some of these are specific to Arnold,
01:09
which is the new uh render that is built
01:11
into three Ds bags that we'll talk about later.
01:13
We also if we scroll down,
01:14
have lots of different kinds of procedural maps that are generated
01:18
in three Ds Macs that we can use.
01:20
We also have, you know, compositing nodes, uh environments that we can bring in.
01:24
If you want to do sort of calculations in in creating your more complex materials,
01:28
you can do that with some of these nodes as well.
01:30
So we're gonna stay pretty simple and we're gonna add
01:33
some simple materials to some of these uh different objects.
01:37
So to create a new material, all you have to do
01:40
is come in
01:41
and what we're gonna do is drop it into our scene.
01:43
So right now you can see we have this one material existing here
01:46
and I'm just gonna zoom out, you can navigate this with the middle mouse button
01:51
in our view. This is where we're going to
01:53
be able to click on our material.
01:54
And if I click on the material, you can see it over here
01:57
brings up all of our parameters. This is everything that's inside of that material.
02:02
So we can change things from inside here.
02:04
And we can also see connections that we have with different kinds of maps.
02:08
So let's start by just clicking on our material.
02:12
And if you have a uh different materials in your scene,
02:15
you can also sample the material just by clicking on this little eye dropper
02:18
and then you can sample any of those objects and that will bring up and,
02:21
and frame the material that you have selected.
02:25
So by clicking on that material, we can come in and you can see here on the right side,
02:30
just pull this down a little bit
02:32
as we work away from top to bottom.
02:34
There are some coding parameters which we won't worry about.
02:36
We'll, we'll uh concentrate more on the basic parameters.
02:39
We've got base color. This is the the physical material. By the way,
02:43
we click on the color
02:44
that will bring up
02:46
color swatch where you can change the color. You can see that update
02:49
in our view port
02:51
and you see the amount
02:53
and then you see the color
02:54
and then you see these little boxes.
02:56
This is where we can start to pipe in maps to any portion of our material.
02:60
We've got roughness values which we can change I O R values, index of refraction.
03:05
We've also got transparency values you can change via the slider. You can see
03:09
our
03:09
objects getting more transparent as we dial that up.
03:12
If you're doing something like skin or
03:15
something that's going to have subsurface scattering,
03:17
you can use this area right here.
03:19
And then if we come all the way down to the bottom,
03:22
you'll see that there are places where we
03:24
can put maps into these different elements.
03:26
And when you start connecting things, you're gonna start to see the maps there.
03:30
Now, if we want to add a different material,
03:33
all we'd have to do is select the material that we want to add.
03:36
So let's say that in this case, I want to create,
03:39
I don't know another physical material. I'm just gonna click and drag it
03:43
into our scene.
03:43
And now we've got two of these, only one of them is applied to anything right now.
03:48
So to apply this new material to one of our objects, let's say
03:52
we'll apply it to our speaker.
03:53
Simply select the speaker and I'm just going to right click.
03:56
I don't know how to assign the material to selection.
03:59
There's also a button right up here where you can uh assign materials as well.
04:05
Now, we've got a new material, we click on that material.
04:08
We can go in and change its color
04:10
and you can see only that particular object changes.
04:14
So maybe this one, we want to be a little bit rougher,
04:16
so we can change the roughness values,
04:19
you can change the color,
04:20
you can decide whether it's metal or not.
04:22
These are materials based around physical shader.
04:24
And so you've got metalist, you've got roughness and things like that.
04:28
Now let's say that we want to use some sort of
04:30
a procedural map to drive something like let's say the color.
04:33
Well, we can simply click on this box next to the color
04:37
that will bring up this material map browser where we can choose
04:40
these different maps that are also listed over here on the left.
04:43
So for instance, we could choose a a noise 3D
04:47
say OK.
04:48
And now you can see that noise pattern reflected on the color of the object.
04:53
You can also look in our
04:56
workspace here in our view
04:58
and see that. Now we have this noise node
05:01
and it's connected
05:03
to the base color of this material.
05:06
OK.
05:06
So once you start to add lots of maps,
05:08
you'll see those connections here and you can very quickly draw those out.
05:11
So if we were to select that link there,
05:14
I can go ahead and delete that and it's gone
05:16
to draw it back out, simply go from the output
05:19
click and drag to wherever input you want to put this in.
05:22
In this case, we want to put it into the base color map.
05:25
And there it is
05:26
we can now select this noise
05:29
and we can start to change elements
05:30
of this node to change the look in our scene,
05:34
change the amplitude and we can make it brighter.
05:36
So these are procedural maps that are generated inside of three Ds max a lot
05:41
of times though you're gonna have a texture
05:42
map that you've painted maybe in another application
05:45
to bring in external files,
05:47
you would simply click on your material.
05:49
Let's actually click on the initial physical material go into the color.
05:54
And so instead of using one of these procedural maps, we're just going to use
05:58
a bit map and we can filter
05:59
anything that we want up here on the top and it will filter that down.
06:03
So you can see here, I have a bit map that I can simply select
06:07
they OK.
06:08
And that will bring up a file chooser where we
06:09
can choose the texture file that we want to use.
06:12
Keep in mind that any specific texture that you create for an object
06:15
will usually require specific U V S for that texture to look right.
06:19
And so U V s are going to be a very important part of creating
06:23
the geometry and the models that you're
06:24
creating if you're creating textures for them.
06:26
So we'll cover that uh in the next lesson.
06:28
But I just wanted to show you the slate material editor.
06:31
There's also if you come up here,
06:33
there's the slate editor, there's also
06:35
a compact editor
06:37
which you can see here,
06:38
you get these material slots
06:41
and so you can work with it that way. I really like to use the slate editor
06:44
because it kind of gives me everything
06:46
that I want to be able to see right here.
06:48
It makes sense to me, I can see the materials, I can see how the nodes are connected.
06:52
And in the later, some of the later exercise files,
06:55
you'll be able to open those and see uh lots of the
06:57
different materials in there and kind of uh see how those look.
07:01
You also have the ability as you come in here, you can start to lay these out.
07:04
So there's some buttons up here for laying out uh your
07:07
materials and you can lay them out vertically or horizontally.
07:10
So they're just a little bit more organized.
07:12
You can also like if you have this, let's say we have this material selected
07:16
and we didn't have, we had some other object selected.
07:19
If we wanted to find out what objects have this material,
07:22
we could simply select the material and click this button.
07:25
And then we can see
07:26
in here
07:27
the object that we have, we can select it and there it is.
07:30
So we can either double click like that
07:33
or we can drag materials into our workspace and apply those to our
07:37
geometry and then go in and add our textures if we need to.
Video transcript
00:04
Now,
00:04
let's take a look at how we can start
00:05
to add different materials and textures to our geometry.
00:08
Inside of three Ds Max,
00:10
we have this sort of music room set up and we
00:12
don't really have any textures or materials on things right now.
00:15
So everything is the same gray material.
00:18
And what we want to do is start to define areas that are,
00:21
let's say wood or plastic or a different color of red or blue.
00:25
And so to do that, we will add materials
00:27
to add materials.
00:28
We want to go to our material editor and there are
00:30
two different kinds of editors inside of three Ds Max.
00:33
There is a compact editor, but we're gonna use the slate material editor,
00:37
which is a little bit more complex.
00:38
So to open the material editor, there are a couple of ways we can do that,
00:42
we can come up to rendering,
00:44
come down to material editor.
00:46
There's also a material browser and material explorer,
00:49
but let's go into the material editor
00:50
and you can see there are the two types that I mentioned, compact and slate.
00:54
Let's go ahead and open the slate material editor.
00:57
And so this is gonna have some menus on the top a row of icons right below that.
01:01
And then on the left are going to be all of the different sort of nodes that we can add.
01:06
Some of these are materials.
01:07
Some of these are specific to Arnold,
01:09
which is the new uh render that is built
01:11
into three Ds bags that we'll talk about later.
01:13
We also if we scroll down,
01:14
have lots of different kinds of procedural maps that are generated
01:18
in three Ds Macs that we can use.
01:20
We also have, you know, compositing nodes, uh environments that we can bring in.
01:24
If you want to do sort of calculations in in creating your more complex materials,
01:28
you can do that with some of these nodes as well.
01:30
So we're gonna stay pretty simple and we're gonna add
01:33
some simple materials to some of these uh different objects.
01:37
So to create a new material, all you have to do
01:40
is come in
01:41
and what we're gonna do is drop it into our scene.
01:43
So right now you can see we have this one material existing here
01:46
and I'm just gonna zoom out, you can navigate this with the middle mouse button
01:51
in our view. This is where we're going to
01:53
be able to click on our material.
01:54
And if I click on the material, you can see it over here
01:57
brings up all of our parameters. This is everything that's inside of that material.
02:02
So we can change things from inside here.
02:04
And we can also see connections that we have with different kinds of maps.
02:08
So let's start by just clicking on our material.
02:12
And if you have a uh different materials in your scene,
02:15
you can also sample the material just by clicking on this little eye dropper
02:18
and then you can sample any of those objects and that will bring up and,
02:21
and frame the material that you have selected.
02:25
So by clicking on that material, we can come in and you can see here on the right side,
02:30
just pull this down a little bit
02:32
as we work away from top to bottom.
02:34
There are some coding parameters which we won't worry about.
02:36
We'll, we'll uh concentrate more on the basic parameters.
02:39
We've got base color. This is the the physical material. By the way,
02:43
we click on the color
02:44
that will bring up
02:46
color swatch where you can change the color. You can see that update
02:49
in our view port
02:51
and you see the amount
02:53
and then you see the color
02:54
and then you see these little boxes.
02:56
This is where we can start to pipe in maps to any portion of our material.
02:60
We've got roughness values which we can change I O R values, index of refraction.
03:05
We've also got transparency values you can change via the slider. You can see
03:09
our
03:09
objects getting more transparent as we dial that up.
03:12
If you're doing something like skin or
03:15
something that's going to have subsurface scattering,
03:17
you can use this area right here.
03:19
And then if we come all the way down to the bottom,
03:22
you'll see that there are places where we
03:24
can put maps into these different elements.
03:26
And when you start connecting things, you're gonna start to see the maps there.
03:30
Now, if we want to add a different material,
03:33
all we'd have to do is select the material that we want to add.
03:36
So let's say that in this case, I want to create,
03:39
I don't know another physical material. I'm just gonna click and drag it
03:43
into our scene.
03:43
And now we've got two of these, only one of them is applied to anything right now.
03:48
So to apply this new material to one of our objects, let's say
03:52
we'll apply it to our speaker.
03:53
Simply select the speaker and I'm just going to right click.
03:56
I don't know how to assign the material to selection.
03:59
There's also a button right up here where you can uh assign materials as well.
04:05
Now, we've got a new material, we click on that material.
04:08
We can go in and change its color
04:10
and you can see only that particular object changes.
04:14
So maybe this one, we want to be a little bit rougher,
04:16
so we can change the roughness values,
04:19
you can change the color,
04:20
you can decide whether it's metal or not.
04:22
These are materials based around physical shader.
04:24
And so you've got metalist, you've got roughness and things like that.
04:28
Now let's say that we want to use some sort of
04:30
a procedural map to drive something like let's say the color.
04:33
Well, we can simply click on this box next to the color
04:37
that will bring up this material map browser where we can choose
04:40
these different maps that are also listed over here on the left.
04:43
So for instance, we could choose a a noise 3D
04:47
say OK.
04:48
And now you can see that noise pattern reflected on the color of the object.
04:53
You can also look in our
04:56
workspace here in our view
04:58
and see that. Now we have this noise node
05:01
and it's connected
05:03
to the base color of this material.
05:06
OK.
05:06
So once you start to add lots of maps,
05:08
you'll see those connections here and you can very quickly draw those out.
05:11
So if we were to select that link there,
05:14
I can go ahead and delete that and it's gone
05:16
to draw it back out, simply go from the output
05:19
click and drag to wherever input you want to put this in.
05:22
In this case, we want to put it into the base color map.
05:25
And there it is
05:26
we can now select this noise
05:29
and we can start to change elements
05:30
of this node to change the look in our scene,
05:34
change the amplitude and we can make it brighter.
05:36
So these are procedural maps that are generated inside of three Ds max a lot
05:41
of times though you're gonna have a texture
05:42
map that you've painted maybe in another application
05:45
to bring in external files,
05:47
you would simply click on your material.
05:49
Let's actually click on the initial physical material go into the color.
05:54
And so instead of using one of these procedural maps, we're just going to use
05:58
a bit map and we can filter
05:59
anything that we want up here on the top and it will filter that down.
06:03
So you can see here, I have a bit map that I can simply select
06:07
they OK.
06:08
And that will bring up a file chooser where we
06:09
can choose the texture file that we want to use.
06:12
Keep in mind that any specific texture that you create for an object
06:15
will usually require specific U V S for that texture to look right.
06:19
And so U V s are going to be a very important part of creating
06:23
the geometry and the models that you're
06:24
creating if you're creating textures for them.
06:26
So we'll cover that uh in the next lesson.
06:28
But I just wanted to show you the slate material editor.
06:31
There's also if you come up here,
06:33
there's the slate editor, there's also
06:35
a compact editor
06:37
which you can see here,
06:38
you get these material slots
06:41
and so you can work with it that way. I really like to use the slate editor
06:44
because it kind of gives me everything
06:46
that I want to be able to see right here.
06:48
It makes sense to me, I can see the materials, I can see how the nodes are connected.
06:52
And in the later, some of the later exercise files,
06:55
you'll be able to open those and see uh lots of the
06:57
different materials in there and kind of uh see how those look.
07:01
You also have the ability as you come in here, you can start to lay these out.
07:04
So there's some buttons up here for laying out uh your
07:07
materials and you can lay them out vertically or horizontally.
07:10
So they're just a little bit more organized.
07:12
You can also like if you have this, let's say we have this material selected
07:16
and we didn't have, we had some other object selected.
07:19
If we wanted to find out what objects have this material,
07:22
we could simply select the material and click this button.
07:25
And then we can see
07:26
in here
07:27
the object that we have, we can select it and there it is.
07:30
So we can either double click like that
07:33
or we can drag materials into our workspace and apply those to our
07:37
geometry and then go in and add our textures if we need to.
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