The “environment” scene included the road, grass (on the side of the road), and the wooden stake.
The road was just a 2x2 plane. I turned it to an editable poly, selected the front and back edges and used the connect tool to add several lines for making the elevated waves for the road.
The grass in the side of the road was divided into 2 layers. The closest was made by taking a few blades of grass which I mesh edited from the Society garlic foliage in max. Then I used the scatter tool to scatter the blades of grass on a small narrow plane. Add a planar uvw mapping modifier for texturing. And then instancing it along the edge of the road. I made dense and thin grass groups using this technique. I did edit random individual blades in editable mesh mode to randomize the appearance.
The second or back grass was made by several planes instances which I textured with a pre-render grass model I found on the web (I didn’t want to merge the tall grass meshes into the environment scene because it would crash everything). I also adjusted the plane individually so it won’t look the same.
Before I started texturing, I merged the car and wheel objects (which was made in different scenes) to the environment scene.
3DTotal
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Texturing:
For the texturing some people prefer to setup the textures in Photoshop using layers. But I like to use the mix map in 3dmax to setup complex textures because it’s easy to adjust each texture’s size and coordinates individually. Even sometimes it might not be as efficient and add rendering times a little bit more, I still prefer this way of managing my textures. I used Brazil’s advanced material for most of the texturing.
The road texture was the most complex because of the multiple mix maps I wanted to use in one material. I started by adding a mix map to the diffuse/color slot, for the main asphalt, then added layers of mix maps for the cracks, road lines, and dirt textures that made up the road. The crack texture which I found on the Internet was important because it added something extra so the road won’t look so plain. I copied the diffuse map to the bump slot to add some bumps on the road. Finally I applied soft glossy reflections (using Brazil’s glossy reflection control) masked with a mask map which made the reflection on the cracks a little bit more intense then on the asphalt, and none on the dirt.
