For the ornaments, I use wingdings or dingbats. (These are truetype fonts.) They can be found all over the world wide web. I convert them in Photoshop to black/white Bitmaps and take them into 3dsMax as a texture.


In the material editor, I adjust a multi/sub material for the armour.
I use a Brazil Advanced material:

Base shader: Brazil default

Basic reflection control: Raytraced and activate glossiness 75%

I chose raytracing, because I used an enviroment sphere with a hdri texture for rendering. For more adjustments, please look at the images.




I select MAT ID 2 and attach an unwrap UVW modifier. Here, you can adjust the mapping per face, which is very handy in this case.