In the following tutorial we will create an advanced rusty metal shader. Although the tutorial makes use of vray renderer’s vray blend material, you can also use shellac material if you are not a vray user.

1. Create a vray blend material, and in the base material slot create basic blue metal material with the following settings:

-diffuse color 47, 50, 119

-reflect color 40, 40, 40

-refl. Glossiness .7

-subdivisions 15

-BRDF – ward

            -bump map – noise (adjust the tilling and the size according to your needs).

At this point, the material should look like the one in the rendering bellow.

2. Now, let’s create a rust material. In the first slot of the coat materials, create a vray material with the following specs.

-diffuse – a rusty metal texture

-reflection color – 10, 10, 10

-refl. Glossiness – .65

-subdivisions 15

-bump – a bump map similar to the one bellow.

If you do a test rendering at this point, you should end up with something similar to the one bellow.

3. The 2 materials now blend in a uniform manner. However this is not the look we are after. We need to control the way the rust appears on the object. Fortunately that can be done very easily with a mask map next to the coat material slot.

This is what I have used as a “blending mask”:

For maximum control, you will have to unwrap the 3d model; this way you can control exactly where the rust will appear.

After having done all of the above your final result should look similar to the one bellow.

You can enhance the shader even more by painting separate reflection and glossiness maps for both materials, but must of the times this should be more than enough.

In the previous tutorial we have went through the process of unwrapping organic models with 3ds max 2012. However in most cases, especially when dealing with simpler geometrical models there is a much easier way.

Part 1 – Unwrap with Flatten Mapping

Download and open this simple 3d model (max 2012 format).

Let’s start by applying an Unwrap uvw modifier to it.

In sub-object mode choose “face” and select all the polygons of the object.

Open the UV editor, go to the mapping drop-down menu and select Flatten Mapping and click “ok” (without changing any parameters).

With all the generated clusters still selected click on “rescale elements” under the “Arrange elements” menu. This will correctly re-scale each cluster in relation to the others.

The automatic unwrapping looks good but we still have to do some manual adjustments.

In order to paint the UVW layout in photoshop easier, we will have to stitch some clusters together.

 We will start by stitching the clusters of cylindrical part. Select the 2 vertices like in the screen capture bellow

As you can see, after having made the selection, 2 other vertices turned blue. That means that those 2 clusters should be stitched together. Move the 2 clusters outside the square area and position them so that the 2 vertices initially selected overlap the other 2 blue vertices (like in the picture bellow)

Now select all 4 vertices and go to “tools” drop-down menu and click weld selected.

At this point the green line between the 2 clusters should turn white, which means that they are now stitched in a single one.

At this point you could repeat the step above to stitch the rest of the clusters. However, there is an even easier way to do it.

Select the edge from the newly created cluster like in the screen capture bellow and look for a line that turned blue in one of the other clusters.

Now hold Ctrl and select the blue edge as well. Go to tools and choose “stitch selected”.

This is the method that you will use in 99% of the situations but I wanted to go through the process of welding the vertices as well just in case you will need to go that way for some reason.

Now repeat the previous step to stitch all the clusters that form the cylindrical part.

Note: Even though we have used the rescale elements command, it does not always work perfectly, so you might need to do some minor tweaks to each cluster before welding the vertices.

That’s about it. Your should end up with a UVW layout similar to the one bellow:

Part 2 Manual unwrapping

In this part of the tutorial we will go through another way of unwrapping geometry, using quick planar maps.

Reset 3ds max and in a new file create a simple chamfer box.

Add an UVW unwrap modifier, select all the faces and try a Flatten Mapping (like we did in the previous part).

As you can see the geometry is split into clusters but there are quite a lot of small clusters that would need to be manually stitched.

Depending on how many of these little patches you get, it may become very time consuming to manually attach them to the main clusters.

Fortunately, there is another way to do it.

In the “Channel” menu, click on Reset UVWs.

In the “face” sub-object mode select the faces like I did in the screen capture bellow:

In the “Projection” menu, click planar (select z in this case) and open the UV editor.

Click on “planar” again to deactivate it and move the cluster away.

Repeat the same step for the opposite side of the chamfer box.

Now select the polygons on the right side like in the image bellow, use a planar projection map again and detach it from the rest.

Repeat the steps above for the remaining faces, arrange them in the square area (you can use move and rotate without any problems but when you use scale, use it on all the elements at once).

The final uvw layout should look similar to the one bellow:

In this tutorial we will go through the process of unwrapping organic models using the new “peel” function in 3ds max 2012.

1) Creating the main seams.
Download the model and open it in 3ds max 2012.
As you can see the symmetry modifier is deactivated; we should leave it like this for now.
Add an Unwrap UVW modifier just below the symmetry modifier. Your modifier stack should look like in the screen shot bellow.

By default, the Unwrap UVW modifier creates some uvw cluster boundaries, but they are never traced in a manner that you can use, so the first thing we need to do is to reset them.

In order to reset the original seams, under the Unwrap UVW “selection” menu, choose polygon, click Ctrl+a (this will select all the polygons) and press “quick planar map” under the “edit UVs” menu.

At this point we are ready to start drawing the seams where they should be. Under the selection menu click edge, and select an edge like show in the screen capture bellow.

Now click on loop and all the edges along that loop will be selected.

With the selection set still active, click on “convert edges to seams” under the “peel” menu.

Now we can repeat the process to draw the seams around the other leg.

We could use the loop function to select the edges around the neck like we have done in the previous steps, but there is also another way to do it. Activate “edge to edge seam”, click on the first edge (like in the image bellow), and when the dotted line appears, click the last edge of the loop. This will select all the edges in-between the ones you have selected.

2) Creating clusters and additional seams At this stage we will create the main clusters for the body, legs and head and unwrap each of them separately. Select one (or a few) polygons from the tail area and click on expand face selection to seam. This is a very useful selection tool because it selects all the polygons you need with one click.

With the selection still active click on “Open UV Editor” and under the “Explode” menu click “brake”. This will detach the main body cluster from the rest of the geometry. Move main body cluster away from the rest of the elements.

Now select everything, and using move and uniform scale, place all the elements inside the square area.

Select the edges on the “arm” like in the picture bellow and convert them to seams.

Now switch to “face” sub-object and select the entire “arm” element and click “peel”

At this point we can repeat the previous step for the leg, but first it would be better if we detach the “foot” so the peeling process would be easier and cleaner. In “face” sub-object mode select the polygons for the foot and click break from the “tools” drop-down menu. After having done this we will peel both elements separately like we did for the “arm”. Using either point to point seams or selecting the edges and converting them to seams draw the seams on the side of each of these elements and peel them one by one. Up to this point you should end up with something like this:

We still have to peel the main body and the head because as you can see there are some overlapping polygons. Peeling the main body is the easiest part. You only have to select it, click “peel” and you are done. With regards to the head we still have to detach the mouth in a separate element. With this in mind, select the polygons that are inside of the month and click “break” in the tools dropdown menu to detach it in a separate element (like we did for the foot).

With the newly created mouth element still selected click peel (after having moving it away from the rest of the head). Finally select the head element and click peel. At this point we have all the elements correctly peeled with no overlapping faces. You can check this by going to “select” dropdown menu and click “select overlapped faces”. As you can see, no faces are selected after having done this, which means that there are no overlapping faces in the unwrapped model. However, we still have to make sure that all the elements are scaled correctly in relation to each other. In order to do this, select all the unwrapped elements and under the arrange elements menu click on “rescale elements”. You should end up with something like this:

Now it’s time to activate the symmetry modifier on the top of the stack. If you want the texture to be symmetrical you can render the UVW template and start painting on it in photoshop. However, in most cases you will need to have a different UVs for the left and right sides. In order to achieve that, first thing to do is to add another unwrap modifier on top of the stack. Open the UV editor and make sure you have “Select by element uv toggle” active. Click on an element and move it away like in the picture bellow:

Repeat this step for each of the elements in the UV editor After having done this, go to the “select” drop down menu and click on “select inverted faces”. You will notice that all the elements that should be mirrored are now selected. This is caused by the symmetry modifier. We will have to manually flip each of the elements in order to correct it.

Finally re-arrange all the elements in order to fit in the UV layout square. You can use rotate and move on each element independently but if you use the scale tool make sure you have all the elements selected so that you will keep the correct scale of each element relative to the others. The final UV layout should look similar to the one bellow:

The only thing left to do now is to render the UVw template (in the tools drop down menu), save it and start painting the textures in photoshop.

In this tutorial we will go through the process of creating realistic wet materials. Although the tutorial is written for max and vray users, the same workflow can be adapted to any software you may use.

1) Analyzing the reference
In order to re-create any type of material the first and most important thing is to look at real photos of what you are trying to replicate in your rendering, and really understand what is happening there.

For example, take a close look at the photo bellow.

Not only the asphalt is quite reflective because of the layer of water on it, but also the glossiness/specular varies a lot across the image. In areas where the layer of water is thicker the reflections are a lot sharper and the bump of the asphalt is less present. In other areas, where the asphalt is dryer, the reflections become glossy and they are also distorted by the bumps on the street.

2) Replicating the effect with 3ds max tools and vray.
To sum it up, in order to create a wet asphalt shader we need a diffuse map, a bump map, a reflection map and most importantly a map for the glossiness chanel.
Open the “wet materials scene” that you find in this zip file.

Although all the maps are already there, they are not activated yet; we will activate them one by one to better understand how each of them affects the overall look.

a)    The reflection map

For the reflection, I have used a falloff with 2 maps (basically a darker version and a lighter version), for more control. Besides the brightness both maps are identical.
The areas close to the edges (where I want the layer of water to be thicker) are whiter and more uniform, while other areas are darker and noisy.

Activate the reflection map by clicking the checkbox next to it in the maps rollout.
If you hit render, at this stage you will end up with something like this:

b)    The bump map
If you activate the map and hit render you will notice that the reflections are distorted in the areas where the map has noise applied. Again, in other areas where there is more water, you need to paint it with neutral gray, since there is no bumpiness.

c)    The reflection glossiness map
This one makes all the difference. Before activating it, the reflection, although distorted by the bump map in some place is still very sharp an unnatural. As we have noticed from the reference image at the beginning of the tutorial, this should vary across the image, depending again by the thickness of the layer of water. White causes the reflection to be sharp (equivalent to “1” from the glossiness parameter), while darker values make the reflection much more glossy.
If you hit a render after having activated it, you will end up with something like the following:

d)    The diffuse map.
Although not really important for the purpose of this tutorial, it has quite an impact on the realism of the image, so activate that as well and hit a final render.

If there is something you don’t understand or if you have any kind of questions, don’t hesitate to ask.