Introduction
Creating a believable 3d model is strictly
tied with an accurate definition of its materials
and textures: realizing and correctly applying
the textures on a model is a complex and long
process in the creation of photorealistic
renderings.
About the rendering process, i will simply
descrive how to obtain a believable rendering
in an exterior environment, and we will be
greatly helped in this achievement by the
new characteristics of the many global-illumination
capable rendering engines.
Nowadays there are many rendering options
to the average 3ds max user, from the built
in “Light tracer” to 3rd party rendering
engines (i.e. Splutterfish’s Brazil,
Chaotic Dimensions’s Vray, Cebas’s
Final Render). To add even more, the latest
6th release of 3ds max made many artist’s
dream come true: the integration of Mental
Ray 3.2.
The principles behind global illumination
are common to all of this options, but interfaces
and programmin algorythms differ quite a lot,
bringing up confusion and differences in quaity
and performance.
For the sake of simplicity i will discuss
only the Light Tracer.
To complete this tutorial you will need 3ds
max 5 (at least) and a graphic software like
Macromedia Freehand or Fireworks (which was
my choice), or Adobe Photshop or a similar
software. I will not discuss the operations
needed to paint in these softwares, but for
our purposes we will just need a very basic
understanding on how to create texts and shapes,
so everybody reading this should be able to
go through the process.
As
well as you tutorial hungry people eating through a terabit of bandwidth each
month we also have many additional staff and running costs involved in creating
these free pages. We want to continue bringing you many free tutorials and resources
everyday, so PLEASE check out our products and amazon affiliate schemes via the
above banners. Many thanks!
Section
1: Planning
Just
as you plan ahead the number of faces your
model will need for its purposes, in the same
way you also have to plan the size of the
textures you will realize. Finding yourself
with wrong textures in the end is a very bad
experience. In our project, we are aiming
for *at least* 1024x768 detailed renderings:
this means that all of our textures will have
a minimum resolution. Lower reolutions will
almost surely lead to artifacts in our final
renders. To simplify, imagine you have a bonnet
texture at 200x200 pixels: if you render an
image where the bonnet fits the render, you
won’t be able to render images larger
than 200x200 without getting artifacts, as
3ds max has to guess the missing informations.
Nowadays hard disk space is (finally and luckily)
a minor problem, so i always tend to “oversize”
the textures so i am 100% sure they will meet
my needs. In this case i went for 2000x2000
pixel textures for larger areas (as the bonnet)
and 1000x1000 for smaller panels.
The actions required to create the textures
and to define UVW coordinates on the whole
model are repetitive and fairly simple, hence
i will explain how to apply textures and materials
to a single element, the bonnet: it’s
up to you to continue with the rest ;)