2 - Novice Shiny Texture in RenX/3ds Max

[moonsense715]

Author: Wub Wub

Skill level: 2

 

 

This is a tutorial to make textures shiny, a.k.a. fake reflective. For it I will be using a simple reflective texture and a simple wood texture. You can get more advanced as you get more skill but for now I will tell you the basics.

 

Here is a basic reflection:

 

Here is a basic wood texture:

 

Now, open both of them up in photoshop (or paintshop pro) and save them both as .tga Save the reflective one as Reflection and the wooden as Wood

 

Open 3ds max and make a box any size. Now click on it and push m to open material editor and goto the w3d tab:

 

Change the pass count from 1 to 2. On pass 2, change the Ambient to white (255, 255, 255)

 

Make the stage 0 mapping from UV to Environment

 

Now go to the Shader tab right beside the Vertex Material tab and change the Blend Mode from Opaque to Add

 

Go to the Textures tab right beside shader and click on Stage 0 texture box and then click None and open Reflection.tga file you saved earlier.

 

Hit display and click the box and then assign material to selection

 

The box should now be black with faded white lines

 

Now to apply the background texture.

 

Go to Pass 1 and go to Textures Click stage 0 mapping and then click None and open Wood.tga you saved earlier. Click Assign to material again.

 

Go to File and export as Wood_Box.w3d in the format of W3D Asset

 

Make sure you put eh w3d file in the same folder as Reflection.tga and Wood.tga or else they wont show up.

 

Click on Wood_Box.w3d file and it will go to w3d viewer. Go to hierarchy and click wood_box. A wooden box should now appear and if u move it around u should see the reflection

 

Here is the finished product:

 

 

Bonus section

Here's another example:

The basic texture is a regular 1 Pass material, and the shiny one has the reflect texture added to it as per this tutorial.

[Shnappz]

Hey Moonsense,

 

Thanks for the tutorial. This is very interesting to what i'm working on at the moment.

 

I have one question if you don't mind me asking:

 

How is the reflection texture constructed? Is it basically the white lines are what the engine reads as the reflective parts?

 

Thanks again!

[moonsense715]

I don't know how the engine reads it but I know that "Add" shader mode on Pass 2 will add the texture on top of the Pass 1 texture.

Here's a basic texture and then the fake reflection added on top of it:

First one has the second pass disabled, second is setup like in this tutorial.

I've added this extra to the first "post".

 

You can read about how materials work here:

 

http://w3dhub.com/tutorials/content/w3d_materials.htm

[Jerad2142]

Add is slightly more costly than screen (or at least it was in 3.4.4), you can also use multiply for a dark shine. If you want to make it a single pass (which will result in the exported object having a lower poly count) you can do it with a detail layer and a detail color of scale (you could do add but chances of it turning white after light gen are much greater).