V-Ray Materials in 3ds Max: Master Realistic Textures Fast

Chrome in 3ds Max and Vray

• How to make a chrome, chrome matte and brushed chrome material

• How to copy a material

• How to use the Reflective Glossiness

• How to use a noise map

• What is a bump map

Let's start with the metals. First let's open our Material Editor, that is M on the keyboard. 

The first thing we should do is name this material Chrome. 

Next up lets change the Diffuse to 1,1,1 (This wants to be as close to black as possible. But not pure black as nothing in life is actually pure black or white) and then change the Reflect to just off white.

Lets copy this material by dragging it over and renaming it Chrome Matte. This is essentially the same material but we are just going to change the Relf Glossiness to 0.7

Lets copy this again and we will call this on Chrome Brushed. Now lets go down to the Maps.

Lets click on bump. What bump maps to is add depth based on black and white. We can see this when we add a map here.

Lets choose noise. 

We can see what happens. There grey smooths the edges, 

Lets change the tiling to 0, 1, 0

and Fractal and the size to 0.5

The amount of depth is determined by the amount in the bump slot. Demo, the default of 30 should be fine for this brushed chrome.

Nice so there's our first 3 materials, well done. Next let's take a look at Gold.

Gold in 3ds Max and Vray

So gold is going to be quite similar to the chrome material we made earlier.

Lets drag and drop the chrome and rename it Gold.

We want to keep the diffuse black and it is actually the Reflect value that causes the gold color.

so lets change that to something around the 185, 75, 10

And that looks pretty good.

For the Gold Matte lets copy the gold over and change the Refl Glossiness to 0.7

and for the brushed as before we will use the noise.

So what we can do is drag and drop the Gold Matte and then go to our Chrome Brushed, go down to maps, right click and copy this.

Now back in the Gold Brushed we can paste this into the Bump slot.

Nice, that's are set of metal materials. Next up let's take a look at Plastics.

Plastics in 3ds Max and Vray

Plastic Glossy Blue - Plastic Matte Blue - Plastic Matte Bump Blue

• How to make plastic materials

• What are Fresnel reflections

• How to color match a material

• Using bump to add texture

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Now lets take a look at plastics. We can use the Diffuse to choose any color we like. So let's choose a blue color.

And name it Plastic

For the reflection, lets make it 140,140,104 (145 all)

Let's also make sure that Fresnel is tick on. Fresnel refers to the way light works when it comes into contact with a material.

The default of 1.6 is fine for plastic.

If you would like to match a color to a photo you can load the image to 3ds Max.

File > open image

Then use the eye dropper tool to select that color for the diffuse.

So if you want any color of plastic now you can just change the diffuse color.

This Plastic is looking good so let's make the matte version by copying it over and renaming it Plastic Matte

Much like the metals all we need to do to make this matte is bring down the Relf Glossiness.

And that's looking great.

Finally lets add a bump to this plastic, copy it over and name it Plastic Matte Bump

go down to the bump map and add a noise map. 

Nice so there's our plastic. Now let's get a bit more advanced with the woods....

Wood in 3ds Max and Vray

Ok we can have some fun with the wood here. Lets go to a new Material slot and call it Wooden Planks

So far we have only used colors and the noise map.

But we can bring any image we like into our material.

Lets click here, next to diffuse, Maps, General and bitmap. 

Navigate to the textures and load Wooden Planks

So you will see that show up in the material editor, but when we apply it it does not come up here. 

To see the bitmap in viewport click on show shaded material in viewport

Lets make the reflection mid grey, around 137, Relf Glossiness to 0.8 

So this looks alright, but we can do much better.

Using Photoshop to make Bump Maps

Lets jump into Photoshop and make a bump map.

A bump map works in a similar way to an alpha map if you know what that is. 

It basically uses black and white information to determine the height.

So you can look at black as 0 and white as 1 and any grey as in between.

Photoshop has these new Filters for 3D which saves us so much time.

Ctrl J to make a copy of the layer

Filter> Generate Bump map - Detail Scale to 100%

Then I want to add a Levels to get the most out of the image

And I also want to sharpen up the image, it looks a little blurred.

Lets save this as a .jpg. We can save a jpg like this, save as....

But I have found that doing it this way takes double the amount of clicks necessary.

So go to Export As, change the format to jpg

Then in future you can go to Export > Quick Export or hit Shift+Ctrl+Q (I think i may have added that as a shortcut)

Lets add the bitmap to the bump, you will see if you change the bump amount the effect will get more or less promanant. 

If you go over 100 on your bump I would suspect something is wrong with your bump map.

Another way we can achieve the bump is to load up the wooden planks texture into the bump, We can just load it as a bitmap again, but it is quicker to just drag a copy to the bump.

You will see 3 options, Instance, Copy and Swap

Instance will make a an exact copy and any changes you make to the image will effect the other one.

A copy is just that a copy and the changes will not effect the other one.

and swap will swap the texture over.

In this case we want to use a copy as we want to make the bump and the diffuse different to each other.

Let's go into the bump and click on bitmap and add a Color Correction.

Keep layer.

Then we can switch on Monochrome. 

If we turn off show end result we will see what that has done.

We can actually double click on a slot to get a better view of it, you can resize this as well.

We can also turn up the contract too.

So that looking great.

Slate Editor

Now I want to switch are view to Slate so you get a better understanding of what is happening here.

Modes and switch to Slate. Drag and Drop an instance into the View.

Again by using an instance any updates will update our material here.

So we have our texture plugged into the Diffuse dictating the overall look of the materials. Then we have a color correct map in between the texture and the bump slot, the color correct makes the texture black and white and increases the contrast.

Technically we can actually plug this texture into both, just to keep things clean.

If we double click on any of these, you can see the parameters we can editor here on the right.

Just remember - this is our material, this is what goes on the object and dictates how light effects the object it is applied to. And these are maps that are plugged into the material.

You can right click in the view and create a Material or a Map.

Lets select all of this by clicking and dragging and shift drag it down here.

We can us the middle mouse button to pan.

Let's create another Color Correction, right click > maps > general

Double click on it and we will see it is empty.

Let's plug in the bitmap by connecting the dots.

and also plug it into the diffuse

I will double click the material to see it larger.

Now we can change the color of this map using the hue shift. (back to 0)

You can change the brightness and contrast here to.

But if you want to change the color of wood we can use Hue Tint, choose a color and turn the strength up to 100. 

Lets rename the Wooden Planks Color

You can then drag the material to the next slot.

This is also another way to add the material to an object.

Rough Wood and Chipboard

Now you have this base wood you can update it with any wood texture, it does not have to be planks. 

Let's create a copy.

You can drag images straight into the slate editor which is fast.

We don't need this diffuse color correct so we can delete this. 

I am going to plug the image straight into the diffuse and into the bump

With this wood I don't think we want so much reflection so lets bring that down to .1

Let's name that, Wood Rough and add it to the Material Editor Slots.

Let's duplicate the Rough Wood and plug in this Chipboard texture.

Nice. Move this over to the Material Editor Slots.

Glass

Well done for sticking with the class up until now. I know that if you are new to this it can be a lot to take it. But once you have these basics nailed you will be able to create any materials. 

Consider this set of materials the fundamentals for you to build upon.

Let's make some Glass, seeing as we won't be using any maps we can switch back to the compact Material Editor.

Let's turn on the background so we can see whats happening when this material becomes transparent.

I am going to make this as black as possible, 1,1,1

Reflect to a mid grey, 145

And Refraction to pretty much white, 232. 

The refraction is what is dictating the transparency, which you can see if I change the color.

Lets run a interactive render, so this looks good but it is casting a shadow. Transparent objects don't cast shadows so lets turn on Affect Shadows.

And now we can see this is looking pretty nice. 

Frosted glass

Now if we want to make Frosted Glass all we have to do is duplicate the material add Frosted to the end of the name and bring the Refraction Glossiness down to .8

We also want to turn off Affect Shadows as now this material is no long fully transparent it will cast shadows. And this looks cool, I really like this glow down the bottom here...

Colored glass

How about if we want some colored glass. This is quite straight forward.

Let's start by copying over the Glass material and Frosted and add Colored to the end of each name. 

So to change the color we just change the fog color

so lets apply the glass and change the fog to red

let's also do this to the frosted glass, this time lets go for a yellow. 

So here we can see how easily we can color glass.

Nature Materials in 3ds Max and Vray

Nice, now let's take a look at some materials out in nature.

Grass would be an obvious place to start. 

Let's switch back to the Slate Editor as we will be adding maps this time.

Let's drag and drop in the grass texture from the resources.

This time lets plug it into the diffuse and and the color correct make it monochrome and then plug it into the displacement. 

Displacement will take up more resources to render but you can see it looks pretty cool.

I would bring the displacement down to about 20

So much like the bump it is using the black and white information to dictate what is excluded.

Nice lets name this Grass and add it to the Material slots.

Lets add a couple more ground materials, lets drag in Cracked clay, rename the material Ground Clay and plug them in. This looks awesome. I'm going to move this over to the Material Editor.

Finally lets try some stones. Rename it Ground_Stone. You can see the displacement isn't really represented very well with in the material editor, that's why i quite like the interactive render. Again I think this looks great. Let's add it to our library.

You can see in a Studio how we can easily get feedback form the interactive render, I think it is best to build materials in a studio as they will render quicker as compared to in a scene with millions of polys.

Blend Materials

• How to create a new view in the slate editor
  

I imagine you are get tired of creating all of these awesome materials. So let's take it a bit further and start combining them and exploring the power of some of these maps.

Let's right click here and create a new view. Lets drag and drop in our 3 ground materials.

We can also make them bigger previews and minimise the maps.

Now let's create a new Vray Materials > Vray Blend. As the name suggest we will blend these together. 

In the base lets plug in our Cracked Clay and in Coat 1 lets add the grass.

if we apply this and run a render we can see what we get.

The two materials are combined. This is kind of cool but not exactly realistic.

We can use maps to dictate where the grass shows and where the clay shows.

Lets create a noise map to demonstrate. 

In the same way an alpha map shows white and hides black this works.

Grey will show .5 and so on.

Lets right click and create a noise map and plug it into the blend amount

Lets double click on the Noise and Show in Viewport.

We need to bring this size right down to see it, something around 7 will work. 

Lets render and we see that the edges of our black and white are not hard enough so the grey is calusing a half and half blend which we don't want.

We can solve that by changing it to Turbulence, now we can see we have harder edges, but we can go even further in the output.

Let's turn on color map and add two new points.

We can make them directly under each other and see what we get. When we render we can see it is quite a hard blend so we can ease the fall off a little.

It also looks like the scale of the grass is off compared to the stones so lets make the grass tile by 2.

So explore some of the maps and material combinations using different maps. 

Dent for example produces this.

Just remember to show the map in the viewport and make it the correct size.

Logo on Glass

Another application for the blend material is to add a sticker on glass. Say we want to add the Luxury Visuals logo to the glass we can create a new view add a blend material

Add the glass as our base and turn on the background

We can drag and drop the Luxury Visuals Academy Logo into the Slate Editor and plug it into Blend 1.

Lets create a new Material and make it red plug that into Coat 1 and render. 

So you can see we can add what ever color or detail we like.

Organising Materials

-How to create a material library

-How to update a material library

-collecting the textures using resource collector

So through the classes I have been saying to move each material to a slot in the material editor.

That is because I want use to create a library.

I want us to make a Base Material library.

So to that open the Material Editor, click Get Material.

Right Click > New material library and save that in your libraries folder.

Then you can drag all of your new materials into these slots.

When you are done hit save. 

You can right click here and change the thumbnails

So you can see them better.

If you are in a fresh scene you can just drag and drop these over.

If you start updating them and want to save them then make sure to rename them and drag them back and then save here.

The * will mean the library is not saved.

If you get to the point were you want to start a woods library for example you can do that using the same method as above.

If you are using textures for your materials you will want to keep them all in one place so to do this we can use the resource collector.

We can find that over here under Utilities.

Update materials and then select the folder where you want the textures to go.

In our case that is the materiallibraries folder in the 3ds Max project.

So when we hit go you will now see these have all been moved into this folder.

You can then move the materials with textures back into the library and save it.

Hi guys, in this video we are going to see how to bring in materials from other 3ds max scenes with out opening up the scene file.

It is quite straight forward. In the same way as you open a .mat file you can go here and change this to .max

Just as you can right click here you can click the arrow in the top left.

Click on the scene file you want to open and hit ok.

Now you will see all the materials from this file in you material library.

Now you can drag these over to the material editor and use it or update it.

You can even then save the open library as a .mat

So try this with a 3ds Max file you have.