The main problem is that we are going to texture an architectural scene. Surfaces on scenes like this are big. For example, the part of the front fassade, left of the entrance is 5 meters (16.5 feet) wide and 7 meters (23 feet) tall. So if you want to texture it with bricks, that's one hell of a big brick map. And the biggest brick map I ever saw was only 3 meters (10 feet) in width and 1.5 meters (5 feet) in heigth, so even with this one there are going to be some repetitions. Thus its up to you to make the repetitions as little visible as you can.

When I first put my hands on the Total Textures CD's I was delighted.

I spent a couple of hours browsing trough those map-archives. The maps are great, especially for "close up"-scenes, but can they be used on big surface scenes? You can bet they can.....I will try to texture this scene by only using Total Textures

To the left are the scene properties. Above you can see the perspective view of the scene - a house. There is only one omni light lighting the house, but you can insert a few more to lit it more to better see what you are doing with the textures. Do not forget to delete those extra lights before rendering, though.

You can download a .max file of the scene here (self-extracting WinRAR).

The first thing I did was to apply a texture to that big surface left of the entrance. I used a standard max material, with a map from Total Textures Volume 3 in the diffuse slot. What I got was big ugly dirty red wall - to calm it down a little I tiled it: U=2, V=2. Allready it was a bit better but the map is repeating, so I picked a UVW mapping gizmo and moved it up. The idea was that maybe I can hide some repeating parts of the map behind the windows.

Maps that don't have big contrasts in color and shapes in them are best for repetative covering of a surface...

With this map it is going to be difficult:
see that dark part of the map at the top?
It's going to be visible when you repeat it.

Before we go any further lets see how you make those materials. Open a Material editor. Click on any of the sphere - this is going to be a material. On the left you see a Standard material setup.

Put the desired map in the Diffuse map slot, and a matching black and white map in the Bump map slot. Sometimes you can use a bump map as a Specular map too. Now it is up to you to set those other parameters - "Specular Level", "Glossiness", etc. to get the result you want. Every material is different and unique...

Ok, back to the paint-job! The house is far from done.

The second thing I did was to make a brick material and apply it to the centre part of front fassade. What I saw was a big sized brickwall on the front and side walls. It was time to adjust that map. After experimenting a little bit I got satisfying results with "U Tile" = 4.5 and "V Tile" = 8.0 ( see images below)

Tiling adjustments can be done in Material editor for every map separately or in UVW Mapping modifier for a seperate object..

For this scene I prefer to create a material and to adjust tiling for every object in the UVW map modifier. If this does not help try to select the mapping gizmo and scale it or move it to get satisfying results.

If you have a map that is 982x618 pixels, that you apply to a surface of 400x400 (max)units, MAX will squeeze or stretch that map until it fits onto the object - the map will end up beng scaled unaturaly. The UVW Mapping modifier will help you to get that map look natural and in best size.

And this is the glorious UVW Mapping modifier (left). Starting from the top: the first thing you need is the "Gizmo". When the Gizmoa, a Sub-object, is active you can work with it. Transforming, moving, scaling, all that is possible to adjust your texture maps to fit nicely. The second very important option is called "Mapping": chose one of the plenty mapping types - they are self-explaining, don't you think? And in the end we must not forget the tiling settings, to give your maps the final touch. Try the UVW-Mapping Modifier out yourself, you will see it is easy to use.