3ds Max + VRay: Materials Masterclass

I am a practicing 3ds Max + V-Ray professional, working in architectural visualization. Here I will show you some of my work so you know what I am all about.

This is an advanced level course about making beautiful 3d materials, therefore, you should already be familiar with 3d programs and their basic functions. I will try to keep the course fairly generic (not too program specific), so that regardless of what program you are familiar with you can gain something from this course.

This course won't be too software specific. I am hoping to make it beneficial to everyone interested in 3d, regardless of program. That being said, I use mostly 3ds Max with V-Ray. I will teach with the intention that the principles can be directly applied to mental ray materials, corona, V-Ray for SketchUp, and also architectural standard materials in 3ds Max. I will occasionally break from my V-Ray settings, and show how to get the same effects in these other softwares, but we will always be inside of 3ds Max. We will use both 3ds Max and V-Ray shader types.

Here I will show you the basics of getting around in the material/map browser inside of 3ds Max. I will talk briefly about the different things available, and how we will use both the map types and material types.

I learned materials before the slate view existed, so I am very comfortable using the standard view. That being said, the slate editor is much more intuitive and powerful, so I teach you how to use it effectively. I will use both methods throughout the course, but focus more on slate view.

There are a lot of procedural maps available, but I don't use all of them. Some of them just aren't very useful. Here I will start to talk about the essentials available with 3ds Max, and I will also discuss some of the instances were I use procedural maps as opposed to bitmaps.

Now I will show you specific examples of how to use some of my favorite procedural maps effectively. We will start with maps that can help to add randomness to your materials.

The gradient map is an essential tool, because of its power and versatility. This lecture will be dedicated to its settings so that you can achieve a mastery of it.

Bitmaps will be your most useful type of mat, being used on most materials / textures that you ever create. Bitmaps also give you the most control over the look and feel of your materials. This is where you can really make your materials shine...with custom painted bitmaps.

This is an advanced course, so I will not be showing you everything you need to know about creating tileable maps, as I assume you already have a good handle on Photoshop (If you need more training, check out my course: 3ds Max Advanced Modelling). However, I will show some of my process here in order to give some advanced tips.

Composite maps are another powerful tool which allows you to combine different bitmaps together in a layer fashion, similar to Photoshop. This can be a quick and easy way to start layering different effects on top of each other in order to add detail to your materials, without having to go into Photoshop to paint custom maps.

Now for some more V-Ray specific maps. V-Ray has a lot of proprietary maps that are very useful. Here we will discuss a few of them, discussing their settings and what kind of effects you can get with them.

In this section we learned the basic of maps. Hopefully, you have a good understanding of what they do and how to use them. We have only touched on some of them in this section, but they are some of the most essential ones. I do encourage you, however, to explore some of the other types of maps. Be creative and think of ways to use them in your workflow.

In this section we will start applying our maps to materials and also start learning about the various different materials options within V-Ray and 3ds Max.

V-Ray materials are awesome and powerful. Of all the different shader types I have used throughout my career, V-Ray materials are my favorite. They have all the power you need in a very streamlined and easy to understand UI. I will introduce you to all the features here in this lecture.

Can't fit all of the power of V-Ray materials into one lecture, so here is another. You need to understand the capabilities as fully as possible.

Much like you plug maps into materials, you can also use some shaders to plug materials into materials. Blend and MultiSubObject materials are two such shaders. You will use them often, so I will explain how to tap into their power here.

V-Ray 2 sided materials are great for certain things. Personally, I use them for tree leaves and lamp shades, but they can be applied in many different ways. Take a look at their capabilities in this lecture.

This is a great material for any thing that you want to have a metallic flake paint look to it. We'll cover the basic settings here.

V-Ray has sub-surface scattering built into the standard V-Ray material, but it also provides some shortcuts (as in they render way faster). Vray fast SSS is great for skin, water, wax and other SSS materials.

In this section we got really familiar with the V-Ray material. We also looked at some of the nice shader options that come standard with 3ds Max. Finally, we looked at the power of some of the special V-Ray maps. Most other render engines have similar features to these special V-Ray maps. In the next section I will briefly show you how to apply some of these same techniques in other programs.

If you have followed along with this course and understand V-Ray materials, you can also work in Corona, which is nice, cheap alternative to V-Ray. In this lecture I will show you a basic Corona texture, and explain how our V-Ray principles can be applied to it.

Many people love to use SketchUp for modeling. That is great, but when it is time to render, if you want photoreal you will need to look elsewhere. Fortunately, there is a such a thing as V-Ray for SketchUp. Your other option would be to export to 3ds Max then just render with V-Ray, but this lecture is about creating the textures within SketchUp with V-Ray as a render plugin.

This lecture will use the Architectural material which comes standard with 3ds Max and is optimized to work with Mental Ray (also standard). Again, everything we have learned up to this point will still apply.